Medical and Health Humanities

Stories accompany us through life from birth to death. But they do not merely entertain, inform, or distress us--they show us what counts as right or wrong and teach us who we are and who we can imagine being. Stories connect people, but they can also disconnect, creating boundaries between people and justifying violence. In Letting Stories Breathe, Arthur W. Frank grapples with this fundamental aspect of our lives, offering both a theory of how stories shape us and a useful method for analyzing them. Along the way he also tells stories: from folktales to research interviews to remembrances. Frank's unique approach uses literary concepts to ask social scientific questions: how do stories make life good and when do they endanger it? Going beyond theory, he presents a thorough introduction to dialogical narrative analysis, analyzing modes of interpretation, providing specific questions to start analysis, and describing different forms analysis can take. Building on his renowned work exploring the relationship between narrative and illness, Letting Stories Breathe expands Frank's horizons further, offering a compelling perspective on how stories affect human lives.

Throughout our lives, story is the medium each of us uses to make sense of our environment and relationships. Stories provide meaning and context, enriching our experiences and equipping us with a framework to navigate our existence. Storytelling in Medicine is aunique, practical book for healthcare trainees, practitioners and educators that explores the ideas and practice of narrative and storytelling that lie at the very heart of clinical medicine and the patient 'experience' of care. It shows how story and narrative can be used effectively to help convey concepts such as prognosis and the effect of illness upon life, and to prepare patients and their relatives for difficult and painful news. Offering a particular insight into communication by and between healthcare professionals, and how it can be refocused and improved, the book is an invaluable teaching aid for educators working in both small and large formats, and for under- and postgraduate students.

Since it was first published in 1995, The Wounded Storyteller has occupied a unique place in the body of work on illness. Both the collective portrait of a so-called "remission society" of those who suffer from some type of illness or disability and a cogent analysis of their stories within a larger framework of narrative theory, Arthur W. Frank's book has reached a large and diverse readership including the ill, medical professionals, and scholars of literary theory. Drawing on the work of authors such as Oliver Sacks, Anatole Broyard, Norman Cousins, and Audre Lorde, as well as from people he met during the years he spent among different illness groups, Frank recounts a stirring collection of illness stories, ranging from the well-known--Gilda Radner's battle with ovarian cancer--to the private testimonials of people with cancer, chronic fatigue syndrome, and disabilities. Their stories are more than accounts of personal suffering: they abound with moral choices and point to a social ethic. In this new edition Frank adds a preface describing the personal and cultural times when the first edition was written. His new afterword extends the book's argument significantly, writing about storytelling and experience, other modes of illness narration, and a version of hope that is both realistic and aspirational. Reflecting on both his own life during the creation of the first edition and the conclusions of the book itself, Frank reminds us of the power of storytelling as way to understanding our own suffering.