The story of narrative medicine

Narrative medicine was first introduced in the 1980s by Dr Arthur Kleinman, a medical anthropology professor at Harvard University, who proposed that in the management of the chronically ill, there was value in understanding the patient’s story of their illness. The modern definition, established in 2014 by a committee of international experts in narrative medicine, states that narrative medicine is both a tool to comprehend and integrate the different perspectives of all participants in the illness experience, and a clinical intervention based on a communicative competence. In other words, narrative medicine aims to directly improve care by offering various narrative-based therapies to patients themselves, or to indirectly improve patient care by developing physicians’ soft skills. Narrative medicine humanises the clinical process and draws from the art of medicine, without minimising the importance of empirical, evidence-based science.