Document Type
Article
Publication Date
9-18-2025
Abstract
Narrative holds an important place within medicine and medical education, but an uncritical use of narrative can have troubling consequences for the care of patients who have limited or no capacity for self-narration, such as those living with dementia. We argue that the guiding principles in the use of narrative within medicine and medical education must be inclusivity and opportunity. We illustrate how medical training can benefit from a more inclusive definition of narrative, and we present a selection of innovative approaches to narrative coming out of literary studies, narrative gerontology, and medical and health humanities that focus on metaphor, embodied selfhood, and critical methods for teaching narrative in medical education. These approaches provide opportunities for medical and health humanities to shape the use of narrative in clinical spaces in critical ways that include and empower more individuals, including medical professionals.
Keywords
clinical ethics, dementia, embodied selfhood, medical education, metaphor, narrative
Language
English
Publication Title
Hastings Center Report
Rights
© 2025 The Author(s). This is an Open Access work distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Recommended Citation
Erin Gentry Lamb and Anita Wohlmann, “ Dementia as a Critical Lens on the Role of Narrative in Medical Training and Practice,” in “Living with Dementia: Learning from Cultural Narratives of Aging Societies,” ed. Nancy Berlinger, Erin Gentry Lamb, Kate Medeiros, and Liz Bowen, special report, Hastings Center Report 55, no. S1 (2025): S57–S63. DOI: 10.1002/hast.4993
Manuscript Version
Final Publisher Version