Narrative based medicine: Why study narrative?

BMJ 1999;318:48-50 ( 2 January )

Education and debate

Narrative based medicine

Why study narrative?

This is the first in a series of five articles on narrative based medicine

Trisha Greenhalgh, senior lecturer, ^a Brian Hurwitz, senior lecturer. ^b

^a Department of Primary Care and Population Sciences, Royal Free and University College London Medical School, London N19 5NF, ^b Department of Primary Care, Imperial College School of Medicine at St Mary's, London W2 1PG

Correspondence to: Dr Greenhalgh p.greenhalgh@ucl.ac.uk

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

	What is narrative?

One day when Pooh Bear had nothing else to do, he thought he would do something, so he went round to Piglet's house to seewhat Piglet was doing. It was snowing as he stumped over the whiteforest track, and he expected to find Piglet warming his toesin front of the fire, but to his surprise he saw that the doorwas open, and the more he looked inside the more Piglet wasn'tthere.¹

This excerpt from the opening chapter of a well known children's story illustrates a number of features of narrative as alinguistic form. Firstly, it has a finite and longitudinal timesequence $---$ that is, it has a beginning, a series of unfolding events,and (we anticipate) an ending. Secondly, it presupposes both anarrator and a listener whose different viewpoints affect howthe story is told. Thirdly, the narrative is concerned with individuals;rather . . . [Full text of this article]

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