Our Mission
The mission of the USC Narrative Medicine program is to equip students with the knowledge, skills, and attitudes to bear witness to and act upon the stories of others, empowering future scholars and practitioners in healthcare and its allied fields to advocate for health and social justice through community engagement and service.
What is Narrative Medicine?
Narrative Medicine is a clinical practice, a method, and a field of study that centers individual and community stories in the service of health and social justice. By supporting self-reflection and providing a framework for attending to the stories of others, narrative medicine can help students, scholars, and practitioners in their efforts to transform the health of individuals, communities, and health care systems.
USC Narrative Medicine seeks to enhance the skills needed to bear witness, to absorb, to make sense of, and act upon the stories, the traumas of others. Our students and faculty stand ready to co-create the kind of environments that will contribute to the ongoing work of healing.
Narrative Medicine open[s] new ways of working with patients… [it’s about] how you really collaborate with a patient and understand their perspective across differences. [Narrative Medicine] gives you insights into how you perceive the world and that really helps translate into all the ways you connect and relate to other people. It’s a helpful tool for… being in a reflective space and continually growing.
– Kira, Class of 2024
It has really opened me in terms of recognizing that…I can’t know someone else’s experience, I can try to know it, and our goal is to try and know it the best we can by using open ended questions and closely listening, but just doing this practice has reminded me to use that lens.
– Eve, Class of 2024
This program invested in me as an individual, and as a result I am equipped to go on and share everything that I’ve learned and keep the work going.
– Kasen, Class of 2023
Click here for more about the field of Narrative Medicine.