Treatment
This chapter describes the narrative medicine methodology of this project, comprising three pillars. First is interdisciplinarity, bridging clinical and scientific research; history of science and medicine; literature and film; literary criticism and theory; and philosophy, among others. The use of rhetoric in such discourses is discussed, as well as the opportunity for meaningful critique in truly transdisciplinary work. Second is narrative attentiveness toward creative and clinical texts, illuminating and critiquing their rhetorical forms and effects. Third is the creation of a challenging writerly text—in this case, in moving between different roles, such as that of diagnostician, patient, critic—and highlighting the author’s own embodied experience, inviting the reader’s active involvement. This orientation shifts the narrative medicine emphasis on the clinician as reader/listener/interpreter to a mutually participatory engagement in which those in the patient role are understood as writerly readers. Finally, the figure of blindsight as a “prescription” for metagnosis is introduced.