Literary Practice as High-Stakes Action: Narrative Medicine in the School of English

Abstract

At the heart of narrative medicine as conceived and practiced at the Columbia University Program in Narrative Medicine lies the desire to maintain contact, the move toward intersubjective encounter, reader and writer, doctor and patient, colleague and colleague. Whereas narrative medicine is most commonly described as arming medical professionals with narrative tools to develop more effective relationships in health care, the human consequences and ethical implications for literature scholars in this interdisciplinary practice are equally profound. “Ethics” can be an unfashionable word in contemporary literary circles. Today’s scientific community, by contrast, regularly tackles issues of empathy and “meaning.” Contact, engagement, and affiliation are at the heart of both the literary and the medical act, and by extension, the ethical act. Post-workshop reflections from the Aristotle University Thessaloniki School of English narrative medicine seminar “Understanding Illness and Trauma through Narrative” (2013) indicate that narrative medicine calls readers and writers toward conscious engagement with the complexity of the other. Around the narrative medicine table, when physicians, writers, and literary scholars alike look and look again at a text, they are called to act, to engage with the real-world implications of those texts, and so to understand literary practice as real-world endeavor.