Narrative Medicine Quotes

But this too is true: stories can save us.

Oliver Sacks remains my hero to this day. He was one of the first medical writers I read. The other was Lewis Thomas, who is no longer alive but is just heroic to me.

The study of sickness is the most poetic of the sciences.

Prose, narratives, etcetera, can carry healing. Poetry does it more intensely.

Story is a medicine which strengthens and arights the individual and the community.

...She's understood the power of stories. Their magical ability to refill the wounded part of people.

I'm trying to be somebody on whom the experience is lost by supplanting it with its telling. I definitely do that in medical contexts, even in trivial ones.

I've always been interested in medicine and was pleased when my brother became a doctor. But after thinking seriously about that field, I realized that what intrigued me was not the science, not the chemistry or biology of medicine, but the narrative - the story of each patient, each illness.

Two or three things I know, two or three things I know for sure, and one of them is that to go on living I have to tell stories, that stories are the one sure way I know to touch the heart and change the world

A story-a true story-can heal as much as medicine can.