1. Narrative is a form in which experience is represented and recounted, in which events are presented as having a meaningful and coherent order, in which activities and events are described along with the experiences associated with them and the significance that lends them their sense for the persons involved.
2. our own responses themselves are culturally grounded, embedded in quite a different structure of aesthetic or emotional response than that of the members of society being described.
3. They were deeply committed to portraying a "subjunctive world", one in which healing was an open possibility, even if miracles were necessary.
4. Disease as represented in biomedicine is localized in the body, in discrete sites or physiological processes. The narratives of those who are subjects of suffering represents illness, by contrast, as present in a life.