“Telling and listening become an antidote to isolation, a call for community.” – Sayantani DasGupta
Dr. Sayantani DasGupta is a leader in Narrative Medicine and faculty at Columbia University. What is narrative medicine? DasGupta explains it this way:
“Narrative Medicine is the clinical and scholarly movement to honor the central role of story in healthcare. Long before doctors had anything of use in our black bags—before diagnostic CAT scans, treatments for blood loss, or cures for tuberculosis—what we had was the ability to show up and to listen; to stand witness to birth, death, illness, suffering, joy, and everything else that life has to offer.”
In this TEDx talk at Sarah Lawrence College and in an essay in Creative Nonfiction on the same topic, she expands on the concept by describing narrative humility:
“Narrative humility means understanding that stories are not merely receptacles of facts, but that every story holds some element of the unknowable.”
DasGupta asserts that “listening to another person is an act of profound humanity; it is an act of profound humility. This is particularly true at those charged moments of illness or trauma, change or suffering.” Have you found this to be true, either as a patient or as a medical provider?
In a healthcare system plagued with burnout, DasGupta argues that narrative humility, learning to listen well to patients, can “deepen medical practice, bringing satisfaction and joy back to an ancient profession that is so much more than a business.”
Writing Prompt: Do you agree with DasGupta that we need to “once again train clinicians to elicit, interpret, and act upon the stories of others, that we hold in equal stead multiple ways of knowing—the scientific and the storied, the informational and the relational?” Why or why not? How can we do this? If you’re a medical provider, were you taught how to listen in your training? Have you considered the concept of narrative humility? Do you think it’s possible to practice this way in today’s healthcare system? Write for 10 minutes.