The narrative-based medical humanities, 1980–95

In this article, I consider the turn to narrative theory that swept through the medical humanities in the 1980s and 1990s. My primary goal is to offer what may be the first historical overview of the field in its decisive second phase (the first running roughly from 1960 to 1980). My focus will be on the efforts of scholars to mobilize ‘narrative’ and related terms to develop the medical humanities as a distinctive field of study. My approach will be genealogical, aiming to identify and delineate the various narrative theories that were put to use, and the aims they were intended to serve. The rise of the narrative-based medical humanities coincided with, and drew strength from, two enormously significant developments in the health sciences, broadly construed. The first was the rise of the biopsychosocial model of health and illness. The second was the refounding of medical anthropology along Geertzian lines by a group of social anthropologists based at Harvard. I offer detailed characterizations of four accounts of narrative (social anthropological, cognitive anthropological, psychological, and bioethical) focusing on why the scholars associated with each discipline turned to narrative and what they did with the concept. Collectively these effected a powerful critique of biomedical rationality. In the second half of the article, I summarize the achievement of the narrative-based medical humanities and consider what they have to offer scholars in the field today.