The Power of Narrative Medicine: Helping Clinicians Understand What Patients Are Telling Them

Rita Charon

Dr. Charon is a general internist and literary scholar at Columbia University who originated the field of narrative medicine. She completed an MD at Harvard and a Ph.D. in English at Columbia. Her research investigates narrative medicine training, reflective practice, and health care team effectiveness and is supported by the NIH, the NEH, the Josiah Macy, Jr. Foundation, and several additional private foundations. She lectures and teaches internationally on narrative medicine and is widely published in leading medical and literary journals. She has been awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and distinctions from clinical and literary societies. She is the author of Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness (Oxford University Press, 2006) and co-author of Principles and Practice of Narrative Medicine, in preparation for Oxford University Press.