Expanding Narrative Medicine through the Collaborative Construction and Compelling Performance of Stories.

This essay proposes an expansion of the concept of narrative competence, beyond close reading, to include two more skills: the collaborative construction and compelling performance of stories. To show how this enhanced form of narrative competence can be attained, the essay describes Off Script, a cocurricular medical storytelling program with three phases: 1) creative writing workshop, 2) dress rehearsal, and 3) public performance of stories. In these phases, Off Script combines literary studies, creative writing, reflective practice, collegial feedback, and drama.

Showing that Medical Ethics Cases Can Miss the Point: Rewriting Short Stories as Cases.

I propose a new role for literature in medical ethics: rewriting short stories as ethics cases. This activity is instructive for its power to show that our standard ways of analyzing cases can overlook deeper ethical problems, such as those the short stories raise. To illustrate this claim, I begin by distilling Richard Selzer's story "Fetishes" to an ethics case.

The moral courage of nursing students who complete advance directives with homeless persons.

Background: Homeless persons in the United States have disproportionately high rates of illness, injury, and mortality and tend to believe that the quality of their end-of-life care will be poor. No studies were found as to whether nurses or nursing students require moral courage to help homeless persons or members of any other demographic complete advance directives.

Research Hypothesis: We hypothesized that baccalaureate nursing students require moral courage to help homeless persons complete advance directives.

Narrative ethics, authentic integrity, and an intrapersonal medical encounter in David Foster Wallace's "luckily the account representative knew CPR".

In Wallace's short story "Luckily the Account Representative Knew CPR," a vice president (VP) suffers cardiac arrest. As an account representative (AR) administers CPR, he discovers his own impersonality mirrored back to him by the VP-a disturbing vision of himself that the AR wishes to escape. Because modern moral theories would have the AR respond impersonally to the VP, those theories would only exacerbate his existential predicament.