<正>Over the last two decades,the role assigned to narrative in representing,conceptualizing, researching and even treating illness has widened in scope and significance.Publications chronicling first person accounts of illness have proliferated,whether in the established literary forms of book-length authopathographies or in less formal contexts such as online discussion for a.the public appetite for stories of(surviving) illness parallels a cross-disciplinary scholarly commitment to recovering the "first person perspective" that is held to be missing from or devalued in the way medicine is practiced in the West.In the field of the medical humanities -but also in medical anthropology,sociology,psychology and philosophy - the idea that patients and physicians are,by virtue of their shared humanity,essentially narrative beings,underscored the view that narrative is the best way of restoring the first person perspective to the medical encounter.Perhaps the strongest articulation of this view is made by Rita Charon in her book Narrative Medicine:Honoring the Stories of Illness(2008).Following Arthur Kleinman(1988), Kathryn Montgomery(1993),Tricia Greenhalgh and Brian Hurwitz(1998,2004),Charon calls for "narrative competence" to be a central part of clinical practice,and argues that intensive narrative training can offer modern medicine the "singularity,humility,accountability[and] empathy" it so sorely lacks.