Health care revolves around stories. Patients don’t just present symptoms—they explain, provide context, express worries, and recall memories.
This is the central idea behind a new undergraduate course in narrative medicine that the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences will begin offering this fall.
“All of us, patients and health professionals, live in stories,” said Timothy Watson, a professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing who will teach the course. “We share stories about illness, recovery, fear, and hope. Those stories shape our understanding of what is happening to us and how we respond.”
The field of narrative medicine took form in the early 2000s, captured in Rita Charon’s book “Narrative Medicine: Honoring the Stories of Illness,” which serves as a backbone for Watson’s course. It’s built on the belief that careful reading, reflective writing, and active listening are not just human qualities—they are essential clinical skills. A physician who cannot grasp what a patient is truly communicating, Watson argues, is missing something essential. “You want to see the person in front of you as a person, not just a collection of symptoms,” he said.
While the Department of English and Creative Writing has offered classes on literature and medicine before, this course provides a new opportunity for students from various disciplines to collaborate. The course will be cross-listed with the college’s Global Health Studies program, as well as with the Nursing, Public Health, and Health Science programs at the School of Nursing and Health Studies.
“This individual course is new,” Watson said, “but it grows out of conversations and collaborations that have taken place for years across departments.”
The course also complements the college’s existing Medical Humanities minor.
Noa Nikolsky, an assistant professor in the Department of English and Creative Writing whose areas of expertise include the history of science and medicine, is also interested in teaching narrative medicine courses in future semesters.
Narrative Medicine (ENG 395) will meet on Tuesdays and Thursdays and is designed primarily for students considering health care careers, although it’s open to anyone. Much of the class will be spent doing something that might surprise students expecting lectures: slowly, collectively working through a single poem, short story, or image. “We’ll work through a poem in class, maybe sentence by sentence, to figure out how it works, why it works, why this particular word rather than another one,” Watson explained.
Students will also write throughout the semester: informally in class, reflectively in journals, and more formally in close-reading essays. “We learn about stories by writing them as well as by analyzing them,” Watson said. The overall goal, as he frames it, is narrative competency: the ability to read and write carefully enough to understand how stories function in clinical settings—the ones patients tell that quietly shape how doctors, nurses, and staff do their work.
