Kate Chisholm

Rules of engagement | 5 July 2018

We are at heart aural beings and, when we listen to stories as opposed to watching the same scenes on screen, our heart rate increases

‘Can one person really grasp the significance of what another person has been through?’ asks Dr Rita Charon in this week’s essay on Radio 3. She’s a physician in New York (isn’t it somehow telling that in Britain we’ve long since forgotten what GP actually stands for?) and as a result of her experiences as a doctor has set up a pioneering training programme at Columbia University. In Narrative Medicine (produced by Elizabeth Funning) Charon explained how she came to believe in the power of literature, of listening to stories, as a way of bringing physicians ‘near enough to the patient to recognise their suffering and help them through their ordeal without disabling clinical judgment or rendering them helpless with passive sympathy’.

Ironically, perhaps, her series of five talks is part of the BBC’s celebratory season marking 70 years since the NHS was born, a conflicted anniversary given the extraordinary pressures on our medical system and its inability, seemingly, to find solutions to its all-too-evident crisis of purpose. Her words resonated powerfully.

You can only guess at what another person might be suffering, says Charon, but you can witness that suffering. And one way to learn how to do that is through narrative, because of its ability to take us inside an experience, to recognise how complex individual lives can be, and to appreciate how different they are from our own. On the surface there could be no connection between the diabetic patient whose funeral she was now attending and the plight of Millie, the pivotal character in Henry James’s novel The Wings of the Dove (recently given a compelling dramatisation on Radio 4). But, quite unbidden, scenes from the novel popped into Charon’s mind as she looked at the patient’s body lying in an open coffin, ‘the body I have known so well… examined and touched so many of its parts’.

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