In her book, Doctors’ Stories, Montgomery Hunter discusses the pervasiveness of narratives (e.g., diagnosis, cases study, rounds) in informing not only the medical encounter, but also medicine as an institution: “Patients’ stories within medicine are more or less pared-down autobiographical accounts that chronicle the events of illness and sketch out a commonsense etiology. . ….
Author: Roxana Delbene
Roxana Delbene holds a PhD in linguistics from the University of Pittsburgh with a specialization in discourse analysis and sociolinguistics. Her research in linguistics led her to complete a MS in Narrative Medicine at Columbia University and a DMH at Drew University. She teaches courses in literature and medicine, and anthropology of health and healing in the Medical Humanities program at Montclair State University, as well as medical interpretation and medical Spanish at The College of New Jersey. Her research focuses on the discursive features that characterize patients’ illness narratives about invisible illnesses. Her latest publication appears in the Handbook of Language in Public Health and Healthcare published by Wiley Blackwell, 2024.
The Patient’s Productive Imagination: The Reportability Paradox in Narratives of Contested Illnesses
Contested or invisible illnesses, such as some autoimmune diseases, multi-chemical sensitivity, and chronic Lyme disease, are characterized by the difficulty in identifying biological markers of pathology. These illnesses manifest in symptoms (i.e., subjective, embodied sensations) rather than objective, pathophysiological signs, making them difficult to quantify and verify objectively, according to the expectations of biomedicine (Malterud…