Howard Brody is a physician-writer who twenty years ago helped to found what is now known as the medical humanities. The term refers to a straddling of fields, including literature, medicine, philosophy, and bioethics, as reflected in the multidisciplinary membership of the community’s flagship organization, the American Society for Bioethics and Humanities. Medical humanities scholars’ broad aim is to improve health care through the use of narrative—both fiction and nonfiction stories, contemporary or from centuries past—to teach humanistic values, ethics, and plain old listening skills to physicians. The roughly half of U.S. medical schools that offer courses in ethics or humanities do so with the hope that increasing students’ empathy for patients will make better doctors andmore satisfied, maybe even healthier, patients. Brody believes that the act of storytelling can improve the physician-patient relationship and help to relieve the teller’s suffering as well as the physician’s helplessness when unable to cure illness. Brody, a professor of philosophy and family medicine at Michigan State University, wrote most of the first (1987) edition of Stories of Sickness in the early 1980s, when little other literature on the topic existed. The challenge in preparing the second edition, he writes, was not finding other writing about narrative in health care but in selecting the key works to include. Following on the heels of the first edition has come a stream of anthologies and scholarly treatments of patient and doctor stories, as well as several journals, including the Journal of Medical Humanities, Literature and Medicine, and Medical Humanities Review. Those interested in effecting health policy change may find some of the discussion about narrative and its relation to il lness and health care arcane, grounded as it often is in literary and philosophical theories that do not always appear germane to narrative’s more practical applications. With a doctorate in philosophy, Brody clearly relishes abstract notions of stories and sickness. But he roots his book in medical anecdotes and literary classics, while also explaining storytelling’s concrete links to patients’ well-being. Any provider or patient who, like themanic-depressive VirginiaWoolf, believes that illness ranks with “love and battle and jealousy among the prime themes of literature” (Brody, p. 94) will appreciate Brody’s book, which contains six new or largely reworked chapters. The development of a community of medical humanist academics and physician-writers has occurred simultaneously with an interest among the scientific and medical establishment in using narrative to illuminate larger truths. Evidence lies in the number of leading medical journals that nowpublish literary sections. Examples include the Journal of the American Medical Association’s A Piece ofMyMind, the Annals of Internal Medicine’s On Being a Doctor/On Being a Patient, Academic Medicine’s Medicine and the Arts, and Health Affairs’ own Narrative Matters, whose stories, unlike those in the other journals, carry a policy message. If all providers were only half as sensitive to patients’ stories as are Brody and the physicians writing in these pages, we patients (for all of us have been or will be patients) would feel much better cared for thanmost of us do in today’s health-care-as-bottom-line environment. B o o k R e v i e w s