[The tale of illness and illness as a tale.].

The practice of medicine is something different from the knowledge of disease mechanisms and cannot be performed without the relationship with the patient. Nothing new: in 1927 - when medicine already seemed to be receiving an extraordinary boost from technology - Francis Peabody emphasised the importance of considering the patient «at the centre of his home, his work, his relationships and friends, his joys and sorrows, his hopes and fears». In the same years, Virginia Woolf came to similar conclusions but reversed the point of observation. To talk about illness, Peabody and Woolf focus on the person: both emphasise her/his historical nature and social dimension. The former, however, talks about the person to tell about the illness, the latter talks about the illness to tell about the person. An imaginary conversation that is still useful today in order to reflect on medicine's inability to tune in to the individuality of patients, to pay attention to the affective and cultural dimensions of illness and treatment, to meet a patient dazed by the fragmentation of responses and by the over-specialism whose logic he or she does not understand, to effectively prevent errors and, above all, to admit them when they occur. The development of these capacities can be helped by the coherent and rigorous construction of an ability to narrate, an essential competence to realise in care those objectives of humanisation and richness of relationships that so often appear aleatory and unattainable.