Narrative critical care: A literary analysis of first-person critical illness pathographies.

Background: Life-threatening illness can be devastating for patients as they experience shifting levels of consciousness, recurrent delirium, and repeated setbacks. Narrative Medicine and its sub-discipline Narrative Critical Care increase healthcare professionals' understanding of the patient perspective, and interpretation of their stories is a means to improving practice.

Purpose: We aimed to investigate book length first-person accounts of critical illness to gain a deeper understanding of universal and individual patient responses and to provide an example of Narrative Critical Care.

Conflicting notions of research ethics. The mutually challenging traditions of social scientists and medical researchers.

Tensions over ethics in research occasionally arise when anthropologists and other social scientists study health services in medical institutions. In order to resolve this type of conflict, and to facilitate mutual learning rather than mutual recrimination, we describe two general categories of research ethics framing: those of anthropology and those of medicine. The latter, we propose, has tended to focus on protection of the individual through preservation of autonomy-principally expressed through the requirement of informed consent-whereas the former has attended more to political implications.