Narrative Medicine: Crossing Health Humanities Cultures in China, France, and Italy

Narrative medicine and narrative-based medicine emerged at the turn of the millennium and have since matured into rigorous disciplines of the health humanities. Originating at King’s College London and Columbia University in New York, these practices examined the healthcare implications of the narrativist turn occurring in the early 1990s in response to theory upheavals of the late twentieth century. Narrative medicine joins health humanities to bring humanities, the arts, and qualitative social sciences to bear on the narrative, rhetorical, linguistic, metaphorical, and relational dimensions of embodiment and intersubjectivity in healthcare. The narrative medicine group at Columbia University convened Narrative Medicine International in 2019 to unite efforts in the field across the Americas, Eastern and Western Europe, UK, China, Japan, South Asia, Africa, and the Asian Pacific. This essay features excerpts from interviews with two leading scholars in Narrative Medicine International, one from Beijing and one from Paris and Italy. They examine the cultural variations of narrative medicine in their countries to characterize local influences on a growing global discipline. The discoveries arise where the stories cross.