Invention Questions for Intercultural Understanding: Situating Regulatory Medical Narratives as Narrative Forms

Abstract

Patient safety narratives are a globally mandated format for representing individual patient experiences, and they include peer-reviewed case reports and narrative medicine. The authors show how the humanistic values described by Carolyn Miller in 1979 could enhance or contribute to international health and medical communication in relation to such narratives. They do so by expanding on twenty-first century work by Bowdon and Scott to provide a framework for considering how narrative competence and narrative humility may allow technical communicators to strengthen their practices within technical communication and the rhetorics of health and science by examining an individual problem within its broader, intercultural contexts.