Part Three: Narrative Knowledge: The Role of Narrative in the Everyday Practice of Medicine

摘要

When a patient presents herself to the physician, she brings with her a kind of "narrative evidence," her story. To many, such evidence might seem unclear, ambiguous, uninformed. The patient's story, like the poems of Dr. Stone and Dr. Williams examined in this paper, offers observations and arrangements of items, physical and emotional evidence and symptoms, implicit and explicit time sequences conveying its information, motives to speech. The beginning of the patient-physician relationship almost always entails a narrative, a history: even in emergency rooms, relatives, friends, or even the police offer a patient history when the patient himself is unable to do so. Very often, the first job of the physician is to elicit a story from the patient.