Editors' Preface: Narrative Medicine, or a Sense of Story

Abstract

���� ��� Literature and medicine, as a field of inquiry and practice, has led to important changes in the lived experience of illness and the day-to-day enterprise of caring for those who seek health care. The clinical legacy of literature and medicine begins from a ground-floor recognition that experiencing and treating sickness are language-using events. From here, we move spirally toward original sightings of the deep events of illness, health, and care of the sick. As Bernard says in his final chapter of Virginia Woolf’s The Waves, “The trees, scattered, put on order; the thick green of the leaves thinned itself to a dancing light. I netted them under with a sudden phrase. I retrieved them from formlessness with words.” 1 Retrieving things from formlessness with words is what we on either side of the clinical relationship are training ourselves to do. Form holds things, makes them visible—psychoanalyst Hans Loewald says writing makes the immaterial material—and so gives power to the viewer and to the representer to approach and perhaps to comprehend or at least to face the real, that which happens, that which matters despite all the forces that collude to keep them invisible. 2 Over the decades in which literature and medicine has opened up these trains of thought, it has spawned many offspring. Questions of the meanings of clinical discourse raised in medical rhetoric, for example, have been amplified by the attention of literary scholars to conversations. Both specialization and boundary-crossing have occurred, with sub-fields devoted to specific genres or time periods, on the one hand, and collaborative work with feminist theorists, oral historians, trauma theorists, psychoanalytic scholars, and aesthetic theorists on the