Literature and Medicine 

About: Literature and Medicine is an academic journal published by Johns Hopkins University Press. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Narrative & Reading (process). It has an ISSN identifier of 0278-9671. Over the lifetime, 700 publications have been published receiving 6366 citations.

Telling stories: the health benefits of narrative.

Abstract: Pennebaker summarizes and highlights the work he and his colleagues from around the world have done over more than ten years in their studies of the health-promoting qualities of writing. His essay focuses primarily on the physical health benefits of writing about traumatic or difficult experience.

Making a case.

Abstract: The controversy provoked by David Barnard's \"A Case of Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis\" and Eric Rabkin's attack upon it is something of a milestone in the development of literature and medicine.1 It is not just that (as a colleague of mine once taunted me) the criteria of an independent discipline include, along with an annual meeting and a journal, a measurable level of internecine strife; the topic of the BarnardRabkin controversy itself marks an era in literature and medicine. For ten years or more we have talked and written about physician-writers, the images of illness and the doctor in literature, pathographies, bibliotherapy, and the maladies of authors—all of the valuable and interesting ways that medicine enlightens literature and its creation.2 With this controversy, however, we at last have begun to talk about what literature brings to the understanding of medicine, that is, about the inescapably narrative quality of knowledge in medicine and the shape that narrative should take.3

"My Story Is Broken; Can You Help Me Fix It?": Medical Ethics and the Joint Construction of Narrative

Abstract: This essay explores some ethical implications of a narrative conception of the physician-patient relationship. I shall argue that the moral basis of the relationship is best preserved and enhanced when the physician and patient go about developing meaning within their encounter in a particular way. Ideally, the physician-patient relationship should be both ethically sound and therapeutically effective. Constructing certain sorts of narratives within that relationship attaches meaning to the patient's illness experience in a way that enhances the healing potential of the encounter. Moreover, when narratives are jointly constructed, power is shared between physician and patient, and the sharing of power constitutes an important ethical safeguard within the relationship.

The whole story.

Abstract: When physidans treat patients, we rarely know the whole story. We know that each person has distinctive attributes likely to become more clearly defined when illness occurs. We learn to exped fearfulness, anxiety, agitation, depression, anger, courage, and, occasionally, concern for others from those who are ill. Eric Cassell's topology oA- a person emphasizes past experiences, cultural background, roles, routine patterns of behavior, mind-body relationships, and spiritual beliefs. It is clinically useful espedally when the patienf s story is not complete.1 Even so, hypotheses about the patient need to be generated and interpretations need to be made. We know that each patient has a past. But what? A protected childhood, filled with love and warmth? A harsh childhood of abuse, loneliness, and pain? Marriage or divorce? Losses, deaths, and other disappointments? All these experiences shape the individual's response to illness, to threats of death, and to death itself. Other characteristics, such as the cultural background, furnish information about the person's beliefs regarding illness and health, about acceptable responses to pain, and about the role of the family when illness arises. And every person has multiple roles, whether as sister, brother, parent, or lover. We can infer some superfidal notions about these roles, but little else. We also know that the person has routines, patterns of behaving in various drcumstances, but again we usually know very little about the specific nature of these habits. Every person has a body and a distinctive interaction with that body. There, too, is the inner world: the wishes and dreams, the expectations and the hopes. We may receive glimmers of this world, but most often we know far too little. Despite the limits on what we can \"know\" for sure, we must try to understand the complexities that together make up our patients. We struggle to understand our patients' stories. We may wish for patients who arrive at the office with complete luddly written stories insightfully describing their heritage, their experiences, the ups and the downs in their lives; but in fact, we are lucky to obtain an accurate summary of the events Literature and Medidne 9 (1990) 150-61 © 1990 by The Johns Hopkins University Press