Narrative medicine has emerged in response to a health care system that places corporate and bureaucratic concerns over the needs of patients. Charon argues that by making genuine contact with patients through storytelling, narrative medicine leads to more humane, ethical, and effective health care.[...]

They are bodies that have been shaped, misshaped, reshaped by the full sweep of the feminine experience: pregnancy, childbirth, weight gain and loss, illness and health, and age. They belong to 54 women ages 19 to 95, of all sizes and shapes, ethnicities and life experiences, who were willing to exp[...]