Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx

Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx rests on the principles that storytelling is central to medical encounters between caregivers and patients and that narrative competence enhances medical competence. Thus, the book's goal is to develop the narrative competence of its reader. Grounded in the rhetorical theory of narrative that Phelan has been constructing over the course of his career, this volume utilizes a three-step method:

1. Offering a jargon-free explication of core concepts of narrative such as character, progression, perspective, time, and space.
2. Demonstrating how to use those concepts to interpret a diverse group of medical narratives, including two graphic memoirs.
3. Pointing to the relevance of those demonstrations for caregiver-patient interactions.

Narrative Medicine: A Rhetorical Rx is the ideal volume for undergraduate students interested in pursuing careers in healthcare, students in medical and allied health professional schools, and graduate students in the health humanities and social sciences.

James Phelan, Distinguished University Professor of English at Ohio State University, is the author, co-author, editor, or co-editor of more than 20 books, including Narrative as Rhetoric (1996), Living to Tell about It (2005), Experiencing Fiction (2007), Reading the American Novel, 1920–2010 (2013), Somebody Telling Somebody Else (2017), and, with Matthew Clark, Debating Rhetorical Narratology (2020). He has been the editor of Narrative, the journal of the International Society for the Study of Narrative, since its inception in 1993. He has received an honorary doctorate from Aarhus University in Denmark and been elected into the Norwegian Academy of Letters and Science. In 2021 he received the Wayne C. Booth Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Society for the Study of Narrative.