Narrative Medicine Meeting

On Saturday, November 15, the Brown Institute hosted the Digital Storytelling Lab’s meeting on “Narrative Medicine.” In the picture above, Rita Charon, a physician, literary scholar and the Founder and Executive Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University, is telling us about her experience with narrative medicine, speaking beautifully about the “deep and unifying power of narrative acts with all the things that made the healthy self… conferring form on a chaotic experience.” Charon reminds us that “stories of illness start with stories of health” and that they are like any other serious narrative we encounter. A group of about 35 participants reflected on the ways in which narrative could change the relationship between patient an physician, and might even help us imagine new forms for our medical bureaucracy, one that uses stories to elicity our underlying values around health.