Healthcare Anecdotes

Abstract

This chapter examines the narrative and epistemic coordinates that underpin the way anecdotes notice and reason about healthcare situations. As abbreviated accounts of some verbal and literary facility, anecdotes miniaturize consideration of situations in ways that are often informative, entertaining, and memorable. Whilst those considered here partake of the characteristics of such closely worked accounts, they have been selected for their observational claims, a focus on lived experience, and the ways in which they bring healthcare situations and conceptual frames for understanding them into close relationship with each other. How do these ‘nutshell narratives' marshal their materials, present and reframe information, and swap perspectives on their objects of contemplation? The author shows that through modes of noticing and reasoning which turn on figurative vantagepoints, anecdotes express a ‘standpoint epistemology' that brings before the mind's eye scenes viewed in a new light. Through switching speakers and hearing new voices, they enact forms of epistemic and hermeneutic vigilance.