Narrative medicine, the practice of incorporating storytelling and communication into the medical profession for a more holistic approach, is continuing to grow in the world at large, as well as on ETSU’s campus.
“Narrative medicine for me is pretty expansive,” said Melissa Schrift, professor of anthropology and director of the Culture and Health minor. “It certainly involves understanding a patient’s story, a patient’s perspective and being able to use that in ways that give us more information about a patient’s background or what a patient’s fear is or how they’re really experiencing this illness.”
Schrift, along with other professors at ETSU are beginning to implement narrative medicine into courses across a range of departments. The Department of Literature and Language is offering “Literature as Medicine,” taught by Joshua Reid, while the Department of Communication Studies and Storytelling is offering “Narrative Medicine,” taught by Brianna (Cusanno) August-Rae.
In Schrift’s medical anthropology courses, she is able to use a variety of subjects including literature, music and art, to dive deeper into medical topics and understand them. In one course, she teaches Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” as a way to explore humanity while allowing her students to engage in a unique pathway towards those discoveries.
“The students respond to it so well because, since they’re not in a science class as usual, it’s something different, but it also engages a very different part of the brain, and that part of the brain is something we want to see in the clinical space as well,” Schrift said. “We want doctors who bring their full humanity to the encounter with us.”
Even beyond the classroom, literature is being used by both patients and medical staff who are able to write about their experiences, and in many cases, work to break down stigmas surrounding certain illnesses. By sharing these personal stories, they can also help others who may be experiencing something similar, all during their own process of healing and self-expression.
Ballad Health in Johnson City has also begun implementing narrative medicine into its practices. One of these ways is through storytelling by providing a space for patients to be heard during conversations with volunteers about any topic they wish to talk about.
Ballad has more recently expanded this to include music and is exploring the healing possibilities through that.
“Most of us, I think, have an intuitive sense of how and why that works,” said Schrift. “Because we all probably have some experience with music. When we’re feeling down, we turn the radio up and put the windows down and sing as loudly as we can. And it makes us feel better.”
Beyond the Humanities Departments, ETSU College of Nursing is also currently working on a narrative medicine project to spread the importance of empathy, along with skill in medical practice.
“I always have students who say this was as important as their biomedical health science courses, or biology courses, because it’s let them think about medicine from an array of different perspectives,” said Schrift.
“Physicians have a heavy load, and part of that is being expected to communicate with a wide range of people, from a teenager in the U.S. to somebody who has immigrated to this country and is struggling to access the help that they need,” Schrift said. “There’s a lot there in terms of what is expected of physicians, and the pre-med health students that I see are always extremely grateful for having some grounding for those expectations.”
