Vieda Skultans & Brian Hurwitz 
Narrative Research in Health and Illness 

This comprehensive book celebrates the coming of age of narrative
in health care. It uses narrative to go beyond the patient’s story
and address social, cultural, ethical, psychological,
organizational and linguistic issues.

This book has been written to help health professionals and
social scientists to use narrative more effectively in their
everyday work and writing.

The book is split into three, comprehensive sections;
Narratives, Counter-narratives and Meta-narratives.

Table of Content

1. The ethicality of narrative medicine.

2. Soldiers become casualties: doctor’s accounts of the SARS
epidemic.

3. Poems from the heart: living with heart failure.

4. performance narratives in the clinical world.

5. ‘I cut because it helps’: narratives of self injury.

6. The DIPex project: collecting personal experiences.

7. Narratives of spirituality and religion in the end-of-life
care.

8. The death of the narrator.

9. Narrative, emotion and understanding.

10. The voice of experience and the voice of the expert – can
they speak to each other?.

11. Wounded or warrior? Stories of being or becoming deaf.

12. Narrative analysis and contested allogations of Munchausen
syndrome by proxy.

13. Confounding the experts: the vindication of parental
testimony in shaken baby syndrome.

14. Narratives of compound loss: parents’ stories from the organ
retention scandal.

15. The power of stories over statistics: lessons form neonatal
jaundice and infant airplane safety.

16. Narratives of health inequality: interpreting the
determinants of health.

17. Narratives of displacement and identity.

18. A thrice-told tale: new readings of an old story.

19. The role of stories and storytelling in organisational
change efforts: a field study of an emerging ‘community of
practice’ within the UK National Health Service.

20. Meta-narrative mapping: a new approach to the systematic
review of complex evidence.

21. How narratives work in psychiatric science: an example from
the biological psychiatry of PTSD.

22. Storytelling policy: constructions of risk in proposals to
reform UK mental health legislation.

23. The temporal construction of medical narratives

About the author

Brian Hurwitz, NHS GP, Professor of Medicine and the Arts, King’s College, London.

Trish Greenhalgh is an internationally recognised academic in primary health care and trained as a GP. She joined the Department in January 2015 after previously holding professorships at University College London and Queen Mary University of London.

Vieda Skultans is the editor of Narrative Research in Health and Illness, published by Wiley.