Rereading Literary Affordances in Narrative Medicine Pedagogy

This paper takes up the venture of critical medical humanities to reread the workings and uses of narrative in narrative medicine pedagogy. Informed by philosophical and literary theory, the paper addresses the kind of work aesthetic experience performs in the pedagogical model of narrative medicine and considers the effects of distancing, relational, and close reading affordances attributed to literary narratives. The objective of this paper is to support the implementation of literary training in medical education by rethinking fiction’s compatibility with narrative medicine’s pedagogical goals, while considering how the “entangled” perspective that critical medical humanities advocates may, in fact, be already at play in narrative medicine by virtue of its turn to aesthetic experience—perhaps inadvertently, and certainly as a potential.