Narrative Medicine : A Guidebook to Transforming Hearts and Minds

Healthcare workers bear witness to immense suffering every day. As receivers of stories of illness, they witness fellow human beings in their mostvulnerable, weakened, and anguished states. Narrative medicine offers an innovative way to deepen compassion for others, enhance self-reflection, and, in the process, reduce healthcare worker burnout and improve patient care.

This book bridges a critical gap between those who have access to narrative medicine programs and those who do not, democratizing narrative medicine practice. It explains basic narrative medicine principles and offers guided narrative medicine exercises on themes relevant to anyone working in healthcare or in the education of healthcare professionals. Thematic chapters can be used for individual reflection or in small group sessions.

Practical and accessible, the book will expand access to narrative medicine, making its principles straightforward and understandable, and its implementation manageable. Special consideration of issues of diversity and inclusivity are also woven throughout, highlighting the contexts and voices of those who are often left behind, and who suffer the most.

Julia Michie Bruckner is an assistant professor of pediatrics at the University of Colorado School of Medicine with interests in medical humanities and narrative medicine. She serves as an attending pediatrician and Director of Faculty Wellbeing for the Section of Emergency Medicine at Children’s Hospital Colorado. She has published creative nonfiction essays in JAMA, Academic Medicine, Academic Pediatrics, Narratively, KevinMD and Doximity. She is a Pushcart Prize nominee and winner of the Bellevue Literary Review Felice Buckvar Prize in Nonfiction.

Anjali Dhurandhar is an associate professor in the Department of Medicine and serves as Associate Director of the Arts and Humanities in Healthcare Program at the Center for Bioethics and Humanities. She is a general internist who has a focus on chronic pain. She has conducted writing workshops for the past 25 years and has edited numerous works.

Eve Makoff is regional medical officer at MyPlace Health, a program for low-income, chronically Ill, elderly patients. Her recent publications and research in narrative medicine appear in Narrative and Palliative Medicine Reports. Her creative writing has appeared in JPM, JPSM, CMAJ, PULSE, J Emergency Med, J Clinical Bioethics, The Perfect Doctor, and OnlySky. She facilitates narrative medicine workshops.