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No patient is an island or what medical doctors can learn from patients

Author(s): Hanna Serkowska
Subject(s): Philology
Published by: Wydawnictwa Uniwersytetu Warszawskiego
Keywords: narrative; medical doctor; patient; medicine; epistemic exclusion
Summary/Abstract: The article analyses doctors’ accounts of the experiences with patients that have changed their professional outlook. The stories of these doctors, representing different specializations, are modeled on Rita Charon’s “parallel charts”, and collected in the Dutch cycle of “That one patient”. This article attributes the emergence of a growing number of medical doctors who report on their profession and their relations with the patients to the fact that a new autonomy and participation-based model has replaced the traditional paternalistic model of medicine. The author further advocates the inclusion of narrative medicine as one of the disciplines of the new humanities. Next to the need to replace disease-focused medicine by patient-centered medicine, which emerges from the analyzed texts is a clear evidence of countless benefits – including benefits for the doctor – following from adjusting one’s language to the language of the patient, promoting the ability to listen, understand and communicate with the patient.

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