Comments: João Arriscado Nunes (CES)
 

Abstract

The expression «Narrative Medicine» involves the combination of two words belonging in modern Western culture to traditionally distant and separated semantic fields: medicine to natural sciences, narrative to human sciences, with the immediate establishment of an epistemological difficulty, which consists of the impossibility of sorting the two terms adopted in this expression in a single conceptual reference system.

In order to address this problem, the three main theoretical approaches to «Narrative Medicine» are taken into consideration, identifying to what extent and in what manner these approaches allow more or less explicitly to bridge the epistemological breach produced by the Cartesian dualism in a unitary conception of the human internal nature and, consequently, of health, illness and medicine.
Since the understanding of the meaning of narrative in medicine necessarily implies an interpretation, this poses a second problem of hermeneutic order, which is the need to specify the «point of view» and the subject of this interpretation: by addressing also this second problem, it is possible to identify the methodological implications underlying each approach.
On the basis of the results of this overview and of a definition of the field in question which can take into account the theoretical pluralism as well as the plurality of the viewpoints identified, the different narratives methods adopted by human and social sciences to study health care and understanding are examined, highlighting opportunities and limits according to a comprehensive approach.

Key words: Narrative Medicine, humanistic-narratological methods, phenomenological-hermeneutic methods, socio-anthropological methods, Narratives in Medicine.


Bionote

Guido Giarelli, Ph.D. at University College London, is associate professor of Sociology at the University ‘Magna Græcia’ of Catanzaro (Italy), where he is director of a Master in “Integrated Medicine”; he was a founder and first president (2002-2005) of the Società Italiana di Sociologia della Salute (S.I.S.S.), secretary (2005-2008) and then member (2008-2011) of the board of the Section of “Sociologia della Salute e della medicina” of the Associazione Italiana di Sociologia (AIS), president (2006-2010) of the European Society for Health and Medical Sociology (ESHMS), member of the Board (2010-2014) and currently vice-president (2014-2018) of the Research Committee 15 (Sociology of Health) of the International Sociological Association (ISA).

His main research interests are in the sociology of health and medicine, particularly comparative health systems, non-conventional medicine and integrated medicine, illness narratives, personalized medicine, aging and life course, self-help and civil society in health care reform.

Activity within the VII Seminar Series Social Sciences and Health. Healthcare systems - challenges and critical issues.