When I was at graduate school at Regent College, I was lucky enough to have an independent study with Eugene Peterson. I suggested to him what I wanted to 
study – the narrative shape of pastoral life – and he asked me what books I would include in such a study. I asked him to pick the books out, interested in what he would suggest. Out of that meeting came a semester long research project entitled, “A Storied Life: Pastors, Novels and Novelists”. One of the books he assigned for me was The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination by Robert Coles.
Coles describes being raised in a home with stories were savored and the spoken word cherished. His parents would sit together and read out loud until deep in the night and young Robert could tell that his parents were entranced by the sorcery of Dickens and Eliot and Tolstoy. It was as if these long dead authors were somehow mysteriously alive and had dropped in for a visit.
Later, when Coles grew up and became a student of medicine, there were two advisers working with him. The one doctor treated every patient like a sickness to be cured. This adviser spoke of diseases and case files and medical charts. The other adviser was the alter ego. He told Robert to go in the room and listen to the stories of these men and women. Find out who they are. Remember they are persons. The latter advice would lead Coles to eventually require his own medical students to take a literature course as part of their degree program.
I have returned to that book often and have given away copies of it to people working in the helping professions. Imagine my delight on Tuesday when I caught NPRs “All Things Considered” and heard them interviewing two medical doctors on the importance of stories.
Here’s an excerpt from the broadcast with the important parts highlighted:
Terrence Holt comes from a family of doctors, but he was a writer and a teacher long before he decided to go to medical school. His new book of stories, "In the Valley of the Kings," reflects his fascination with language rather than his life as a physician. Being comfortable in the world of literature, Holt says, is enormously helpful in the practice of medicine.
Dr. TERRENCE HOLT (Author, "In the Valley of the Kings"): You are used to dealing with ambiguities if you are familiar with literature, and a lot of medicine is ambiguous. But I think maybe the most important thing is that you get, vicariously, but I think in a very useful way, experience with other people that you couldn’t get any other way, with seeing the world as other people see it.
(Soundbite of elevator bell)
NEARY: Now a specialist in geriatrics, Holt is on the faculty in the school of medicine at the University of North Carolina. One recent morning, he went on rounds with a group of residents and interns.
Unidentified Woman: Mr. S. He’s our 50-year-old guy, history of alcohol and marijuana abuse, presenting from (unintelligible), found to have an MRI finding suggestive of (unintelligible), and…
Dr. HOLT: Patients bring us stories. We drop into the middle of patients’ stories and try to change the plot for the better. First we have to try to understand it, however. I mean, the first thing that happens when a patient comes in is they start telling a story, and you try to figure out what it means.
Unidentified Man: He was a little bit more spastic this morning than I’ve seen him. He was having some pretty significant (unintelligible) in his upper extremities, and I hadn’t seen that before. And I asked him if that was usual for him, and he says that happens fairly frequently. He says it particularly happens when he’s around women. He says he gets a little nervous and starts shaking when he’s around women, so…
NEARY: Abraham Verghese also says a patient’s history is like a story. If you listen carefully, he says, you will hear the clues needed to make a diagnosis.
Dr. VERGHESE: I’m always struck that when I’m called in as a consultant, it’s very rare that some extra piece of knowledge tucked away in my brain solves the puzzle. Much more often, it’s the fact that the story I am hearing resonates with my collection of stories, and – or there is an element in that story that reminds of something in my catalog of stories, and I go seek out the other elements. So I think narrative is huge in medicine.
