Narrative Ethics

Stephen C Brock, Medical Education Consultant, Bexley, Ohio, USA

Published online: September 2006

DOI: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0005885

Narrative ethics is one approach to medical ethics of the clinical encounter. Narrative ethics is the form of medical ethics that accounts for personal identity experienced as life-narrative. It expands the scope of ‘beneficence’ as it is usually manifest by the professional in the clinical encounter. It is a tool in the phenomenological analysis of illness experiences with the potential for influencing professional practice.

Keywords: ethics; narrative; medical genetics; medical ethics

 References
    book Arras JD (2000) "Nice story, but so what? Narrative and justification in ethics". In: Nelson HL (ed.) Stories and their Limits: Narrative Approaches to Bioethics. New York, NY: Routledge.
    book Beauchamp TL and Childress F (2001) Principles of Biomedical Ethics. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    Brock SC (1995) Narrative and medical genetics: On ethics and therapeutics. Qualitative Health Research 5(2): 150–168.
    book Brody H (1987) Stories of Sickness. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.
    Burgess MM, Laberge CM and Knoppers BM (1998) Bioethics for clinicians: 14. Ethics and genetics in medicine. Canadian Medical Association Journal 159(9): 1085–1087.
    book Gergen K and Gergen MM (1997) "Narratives of the self". In: Hinchman LP and Hinchman SK (eds.) Memory, Identity, Community: The Idea of Narrative in the Human Sciences, pp. 161–184. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
    Kash KM (1995) Psychosocial and ethical implications of defining genetic risk for cancers. Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 768: 41–52.
    book Kleinman A (1988) The Illness Narratives: Suffering, Healing, and the Human Condition. New York, NY: Basic Books.
    book Leder D (1990) The Absent Body. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
    book MacIntyre A (1981) After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
    book Murray TH (2000) "What do we mean by ‘narrative ethics’?" In: Nelson HL (ed.) Stories and their Limits: Narrative Approaches to Bioethics. New York, NY: Routledge.
    book Nelson HL (ed.) (2000) "How to do things with stories". Stories and their Limits: Narrative Approaches to Bioethics. New York, NY: Routledge.
    book Pellegrino ED (1982) "Being ill and being healed". In: Kestenbaum V (ed.) The Humanity of the Ill: Phenomenological Perspectives. Knoxville, TN: The University of Tennessee Press.
    book Schechtman M (1996) The Constitution of Selves. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
 Further Reading
    other Brock (1995) For references to a wide variety of other applications of narrative to the medical encounter and the patient's illness narrative.
    book Bruner J (1986) Actual Minds, Possible Worlds. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
    book Charon R (1994) "Narrative contributions to medical ethics: recognition, formulation, interpretation, and validation in the practice of the ethicist". In: DuBose ER, Hamel R and O'Connell LJ (eds.) A Matter of Principles? Ferment in U.S. Bioethics, pp. 260–283. Valley Forge, PA: Trinity Press International. Review of narrative ethics.
    book Kemp P (1999) "From ethics to bioethics". In: Kearney R and Dooley M (eds.) Questioning Ethics: Contemporary Debates in Philosophy, pp. 283–293. New York, NY: Routledge. Offers a concise treatment of the foundations of ‘bioethics’ and its relationship to the ethics of the medical encounter, which has been the subject here.
    book Mattingly C and Garro LC (eds.) (2000) Narrative and the Cultural Construction of Illness and Healing. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. An excellent compilation of articles, which span the contemporary applications of narrative in anthropology and medicine.
    book Reismann CK (1993) Narrative Analysis. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications. For information on narrative as a method for conducting qualitative health research.

Related Sub-Topics:

Bioethics | Philosophy of the Life Sciences
Contact Editor close
Submit a note to the editor about this article by filling in the form below.

* Required Field

Article Title: Narrative Ethics
 
How to Cite close
Brock, Stephen C(Sep 2006) Narrative Ethics. In: eLS. John Wiley & Sons Ltd, Chichester. http://www.els.net [doi: 10.1002/9780470015902.a0005885]