The Practical Application of Narrative Medicine at Mayo Clinic: Imagining the Scaffold of a Worthy House

Abstract

American health care institutions increasingly recognize narrative medicine as a means to developing quality patient care. More commonly applied in health care professional development settings, narrative medicine is less overtly employed with patient populations. In this article, we describe the application of various narrative practices in the patient care and medical education programs of a major health care center in Minnesota. We discuss the impact of these programs on their participants in relation to the evidence based in current scholarship. Further, we examine narrative externalization of illness in Katherine Butler Hathaway’s disability memoir “The Little Locksmith,” a text which implicates the work of metaphor-making as a transformative step in healing. While several reports demonstrate that patients can find creative writing during times of illness to be therapeutic, there are many for whom the practice is problematic or unattractive, obstacles to practice implementation that the authors discuss. However, based on the experience of our institution, for health care institutions seeking to build a legacy of leadership in empathic patient care, narrative—employed in mentoring physicians in training and in establishing strong, dialogic relationships with patients and colleagues—should serve as a central strategy, or scaffold.