This essay on Rita Charon’s thought, focusing essentially on the volume entitled Narrative Medicine, aims to propose a theoretical portrait and trace the lines of its practical development, on the theme of ‘narrative medicine’. Next to the traditional therapeutic protocol, based on pharmacological treatment of the disease, narrative medicine operates in the spirit of dialogue between the patient and the caregiver. It mainly defines the field of ‘confession’ by the sick person and sanctions the inauguration of an autobiographical horizon. First-person narrative, understood as a moment of free expression of a patient’s story, feelings, and suffering, belongs to a ‘humanistic’ healing function. It defines a treatment based on speech, on thought, on the intimate story of the patient narrated directly by the voice of the protagonist. Therefore, the study aims to document a therapeutic practice, not alternative to pharmacological or traditional action, but integrative. This is given in order to illuminate, especially through interpretation by the ‘narrative doctor,’ the patient’s ‘text’ in order to understand and interpret more organically both the ‘case’ as a whole and the psychological, moral or cultural foundation of the illness.
