Minding the Gap(s): Narrativity and Liminality in Medical Student Writing

Therese Jones,Felicia Cohn,Johanna Shapiro

doi:10.1353/lm.2012.0015

Abstract

With the publication of The Wounded Storyteller, sociologist Arthur Frank made a major contribution to conceptualizing and classifying patient pathographies or stories of illness. The categories of illness narratives that he identified—restitution, chaos, quest, testimony— are now widely applied as interpretive frameworks for the patient experience of illness. Elsewhere Cohn and Shapiro, et al., argue that, at the deepest level, Frank’s categories are relevant to the human condition, to those narratives that emerge from suffering, powerlessness, and loss of control. Because medical students experience traumatic and transformative events in the course of their training, the stories they construct can also be understood and organized through similar conceptual categories.

Highlights

Minding the Gap(s): Narrativity and Liminality in Medical Student Writing “. . . ordeals, myths, maskings, the presentation of icons to novices, secret languages, food and behavioural taboos create a weird domain in the seclusion camp . . . and the novices are induced to think, and think hard, about cultural experiences they had taken for granted.”
After sharing a subset of essays with a literature scholar (Therese Jones), we realized how the “betwixt and between” position of these student narrators was woven throughout the various typologies we explored in the sample.[17]
Students were more likely to tell restitution stories than any other type of story, reflecting the modern and technologic find-it-and-fix-it mentality that still predominates in medicine.[60]

Summary

Introduction

Minding the Gap(s): Narrativity and Liminality in Medical Student Writing “. . . ordeals, myths, maskings, the presentation of icons to novices, secret languages, food and behavioural taboos create a weird domain in the seclusion camp . . . and the novices are induced to think, and think hard, about cultural experiences they had taken for granted.”. It challenges conventional wisdom and expresses a commitment to stand with the suffering other.[15] When writing a witnessing narrative in response to an ethical dilemma, the student acknowledges the complexity of the moral issue and demonstrates empathy for the vulnerable patient.

Results

Conclusion