Well put

Daniel Marleau

I am still stunned. All that I came to realize after practising and teaching family medicine for 26 years, the essence of what I have been struggling to achieve in my career, everything was articulated perfectly by Dr Charon: “The writing renders the … treatment a healing conversation between [doctor and patient]. Until the writing, there are 2 isolated beings … both of whom suffer, and both of whom suffer alone.”1

I just finished reading the summer story issue of Canadian Family Physician (August 2007), and that spark of enthusiasm was all I needed to finally get in touch with Dr Charon. I first encountered the formal term of narrative medicine in an article she wrote for the New England Journal of Medicine in February 2004 and again a year later in her article honouring Susan Sontag. Ever since, I have been fantasizing about taking a sabbatical at Columbia, but I felt I would be crippled by my lack of knowledge of the English language; and in those matters of creativity (to state the corollary of what Boileau once said), if one cannot express oneself clearly, one just cannot think. Maybe it would be more realistic to start by attending one of Dr Charon’s seminars or intensive training workshops at Columbia University. I would appreciate direction to a specific website that would provide me with the appropriate information.

Purely as a dilettante, I started writing articles on how to better understand the practice of family medicine in light of what art, science, and literature have to convey. Last winter I spent all my weekends wrestling with Chekhov in quantum mechanics. This year I intend to tackle the immense achievement of Albert Camus and particularly his notions of absurdity and revolt. (As an anecdote, did you know that Camus went to Columbia in the spring of 1946 and gave a conference in the MacMillan auditorium? He was then introduced as Albert Camoose!) I want to thank Dr Charon for her contributions to the summer story issue.