«Narrative Medicine: What Discourse adds to Listening», Maria de Jesus Cabral et al

"The staggering evolution of medicine as a science increasingly subject to technology has confronted medicine itself with the need to renew its connections to thehuman experience and the humanities; valorising the experience and expressionof the disease as well as clinical evidences, imaging and applied bioinformatics.Therefore the notions of the context of illness, of dialogue and attentive listening,have gained relevance in Medical Humanities, namely through Narrative Medicine,bringing differentiated resources to medical practice and training. In relation to theclinical encounter, the report or narrative is characterized by multiple dimensionsof orality, corporality and kinesthesia; the loco, immediacy and co-presence of the communication create discursive events, modes of organization of subjectivity and processes of relating which are very different to those appearing in textualnarratives.Thus, based on theorists of language such as Barthes, Benveniste andMeschonnic, this essay will ask if clinical communication and attentive listening might not be explored as a function of discourse, as a language enacting thesubjectivation of the speaker, culturally and historically inscribed in the act of speaking. Such notions suggest a revision of a conventional understanding of narrativity — firmly grounded on formal and causal logic — through a discursiveapproach, encompassing the way in which narrative is transmitted as body-language reciprocity, and enhancing issues of voice, rhythm and also silence" - Abstract

Reference:

Cabral, Maria de Jesus, Marie-France Mamzer, Christian Hervé, Cecilia Beecher Martins, Rita Charon. «Narrative Medicine: What Discourse adds to Listening». Anglo Saxonica. Ser. III, 2017, nº 13: 159-180 p.