Thanks to people like Laura Hope-Gill (one of Heather's mentors) and John Fox, the study and work of narrative medicine is taking place.

From Laura Hope-Gill:

"Narrative Medicine is the practice of integrating the human understanding we glean from art and literature into medical care. There are things we never say to our doctors, and there are things doctors never say. These unsaid things form a delicate intersection and dangerous distance in the examining and counseling room. Narrative medicine seeks to close this space by increasing the attention we pay one another and ourselves. Diagnosis becomes a moment of sacrament as caregivers embrace rather than squander the power found in illness, the power to create a space for solution if solution is possible, to power to accept death if it isn’t. In Narrative Medicine, the traditional hostility to introspection and the application of universal principles to particular cases, and the result drift away from self in both caregiver and patient give way to the face-to-face inter-relationship that invites one person to answer another’s call for help by being both clinically and emotionally present.

In Narrative Medicine, attending to oneself increases one’s capacity to attend to others. The biomedical meets the psychosocial as a patient or client’s story becomes data. Reflectively, Narrative Medicine acknowledges that medical and clinical training, for understandable reasons in terms of the weighty demands, little effort is given to develop emotional health. Our physicians and clinicians dwell in a field fraught with emotions of grief and frustration and conscience but are given little resource to engage them. Professional identity is encouraged over human selfhood. By engaging in the practice of narration, the fragments come together, enabling the provider to provide for him or herself more attentively and to extend this provision to others.

Three core practices comprise narrative training: close reading, deep listening, and telling through reflective writing. These practices create more room within us for new experience. They allow us to turn experience into objects we can then use for growth. They allow others to share in expression with others what we carry often in isolation.

Our stories pull us into one another. By listening, we empower the person across from us to feel like a human.

We expect no one to be good at this, only to take risks and enjoy the experience. For just as being human comes without straightforward mechanisms, being present with one another invites interpretation and inquiry. We are all trying to locate ourselves within our experiences, and in writing and listening, we discover the dynamic compasses that can guide us through in wholeness."