Response

Rita Charon

I appreciate the thoughtful correspondence I have received in response to my August 2007 essay entitled “What to do with stories. The sciences of narrative medicine.”1 I find each of the comments rich and provocative, both intellectually and relationally. That is to say, the comments demonstrate the emergence of a fresh discourse marked by multiplicity and intersubjectivity, in which the care of the sick becomes the locus for health care practice, discovery-bound intellectual curiosity, and relation-building among members of an international community.

Dr Poon’s comments prompt some clarification on my part. By no means did I mean to imply that I thought I had, single-handedly, brought narrative to medicine! Heavens! Hippocrates, Galen, Thomas Mann, and Freud did that long ago. Certainly the social constructivists had a hand in it, as did the sociolinguists, the phenomenologists, the medical anthropologists—in short, all those scholars and writers and artists who realized that the body is a portal of the self.

The case of narrative therapy interests me a great deal. Here, in the practice of family therapists, is a crystallization of the therapeutic implications of narrative medicine theory. I take—and have written on—narrative therapy as a most instructive and pioneering exemplar of the practical sequelae of thinking along the lines of narrative medicine. I hope in the short future to have a means of dialogue between practitioners of narrative therapy and the theorists of narrative medicine. But there is so much to do!