The article establishes background information as to what a "narartive" of an illness is and how patients perceive their illnesses. The article makes use of an example of patients stories who suffer from epilepsy in Ankara and it uses statistics from studies in the Ankara region.
The article itself makes reference to works of another anthropologist but does not have a bibliography itself because it is part of a book.
This article focuses in on the cutural beliefs that influence how a patient may interpret and relay the "narrartive" of their disease. The article shows a connection between the physical impact of a disease on a patient, how the disease is percieved in their culture, and how they describe the disease and seek treatment for it.
This article is referenced in various other papers concerning cultural factors in patient treatment.
Byron J. Good is a medical anthropologist and Professor of Medical Anthropology at Harvard Medical School and Professor of Cultural Anthropology in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard. Good's writings have primarily focused on the cultural meaning of mental illnesses, patient narratives of illness, and development of mental health systems.
Emergency response is not specifically addressed in this article, but the ideas of how patients interpret their disease is useful to emergency responders so they understand methods of gathering information and initial patient care.
The arguments in the article are primarily supported by analysis of narratives given by patients who participated in an interview.
"As a result, however, the stories were often quite ambiguous as to the nature of the illness, and it was often unclear whether the stories were "reports of experience" or were largely governed by a typical cultural form or narrative structure"
"Stories, perhaps better than other forms, provide a glimpse of the grand ideas that often seem to elude life and defy rational description. Illness stories often seem to provide an especially fine mesh for catching such ideas.
"much of what we know about illness we know through stories - stories told by the sick about their experiences, by family members, doctors, healers, and others in the society. This is a simple fact. "An illness" has a narrative structure, although it is not a closed text, and it is composed as a corpus of stories."