Narrative medicine: form, function, and ethics.

Sickness and healing are, in part, narrative acts. Patients write about their illnesses with increasing frequency, which suggests that finding the words to contain the chaos of illness enables the sufferer to endure it better (1–3). We physicians, too, write more and more frequently about ourselves and our practices (4, 5). In many forms of narrative writing, doctors are endorsing the hypothesis that writing about oneself and one’s patients confers on medical practice a kind of understanding that is otherwise unobtainable (6).