Narrative medicine: thinking with stories during The Plague

People integrate life experiences in an inner story to construct a self-narrative1. This inner story, or narrative structure of a person’s life, is meant to make sense of these experiences. Similarly, experiences of illness are integrated in an inner story, and in listening to a patient’s story, physicians should adopt an attitude of thinking with stories instead of about them2. Thinking with stories requires the physician to join the illness narrative and adopt “the story’s immanent logic of causality, temporality, and narrative tensions”, as opposed to conceiving these narratives as an object of (biomedical) analysis alone2.