Community – Page 3 – Health Story Hub

Close reading a Twitter thread: Blind on the NHS

2 page (total) text presented here is a health narrative presented as a Twitter thread that raises issues that could be connected to several themes in courses related to health communication, reproductive justice, public health, narrative medicine, or more general writing courses to which the instructor wanted to add a health component. The outline includes detailed instructions for close reading the text, a central form of inquiry in narrative medicine. The goal of this instructional strategy is to can help participants attend closely to the narrative and find a point of personal connection to it. The format of the health narrative - a thread of about 20 tweets - lends itself to analyzing the role or impact of the medium on circulation of the message. Short enough to read aloud in a 45-50 minute class and work from there; could also be used in a workshop or storytelling group centered on prenatal care and/or disability.

Haiku Rules of the Road

The online publication Pulse: Voices from the Heart of Medicine provides this brief set of instructions for writing haiku. The Pulse site also includes many examples of haiku. These instructions (and examples from the site) could be used in a variety of settings. For example, the Northwest Narrative Medicine Collaborative teaches a session on writing haiku as part of it's narrative scribe training, a workshop dedicated to developing the skills of listening closely to a story, and then offering it back to the teller. Just as medical record keeping often distills a detailed patient narrative into the forms required for diagnosis and health record keeping, so too haiku can be used to distill a narrative into a gist. The contrast between what details might make it into an electronic health record and what details a haiku might focus upon can prompt discussion of what is left out of many clinical interactions. Writing haiku can also be a useful exercise in college courses. It is an accessible form of poetry to teach as one example and can prompt discussion of what constitutes a narrative.