Medical Interpretation: Implications of Literary Theory of Narrative for Clinical Work

Literary narrative theory offers robust conceptual frameworks for understand-ing the act of writing, the act of reading, the configuration of plot, and the narrative contract that binds writer and reader together. This article applies some current theoretical approaches used in studying literary storytelling to the storytelling that takes place in the doctor's office, conceptualizing the patient as the writer or teller and the doctor as the reader or listener. By inspecting clinical medicine as a narrative enterprise, shot through with the ambiguities and language-borne allusiveness of the fictional text, this study demonstrates ways in which patients and doctors may better understand their complex and often unsuccessful attempts to hear one another to the end. (General Internal Medicine and Literature)