Editor’s Corner
October 9, 2009
Reviving Medical Narrative
By
Andrea Pitzer
Medical stories have been done so well in so many ways that it can be hard for new narratives to emerge from their forerunners’ shadows. How do you write a surgical drama better than Jon Franklin’s “Mrs. Kelley’s Monster”? How can you carry readers through an AIDS narrative that tops Jacqui Banaszynski’s classic “AIDS in the Heartland”? And what about Anne Hull and Dana Priest’s stories on the neglected veterans of Walter Reed?
Tom Curwen’s “Ana’s Story” from the Los Angeles Times earlier this year approaches disfigurement in young people in a way that recalls “The Boy Behind the Mask,” Tom Hallman’s series from The Oregonian. Trying to find a new angle for his piece, Curwen delves deeply into how his subject, Ana, had both struggled against and surrendered to the limits of her condition.
Lee Hancock also separates herself from the pack with our latest Notable Narrative, “Choosing Thomas,” a two-part serial from The Dallas Morning News. The piece started as a project about end-of-life care for adults, and then photographer Sonya Hebert got interested in what palliative care for newborns might look like. Thomas’ parents welcomed the involvement of Hancock and Hebert in the hopes that the story might raise awareness about the need for greater attention to end-of-life care. Yet both the print story and the video keep the focus on the family’s preparations for birth and how they spend Thomas’ short life. Hancock’s simple prose and the video showing Thomas’ death make the need for palliative care much more apparent than if they had tried to cover the policy angle head-on.
While not a traditional news outlet, Narrative Matters is another source for wonderfully original medical stories (see our post about the site on Nieman Storyboard). Jerald Winakur’s “What Are We Going To Do with Dad?,” a past Notable Narrative that ran on the Narrative Matters site, tells the story of a doctor who grieves over the choices available to his 86-year-old father.
What do all these stories have in common? They focus on their protagonists, rather than just a disease or a policy issue. The writer goes deep into the life of the subject, bringing back the necessary information while leaving enough room for the reader to draw his or her own conclusions. And whether the reporters share the story of someone caught between a dying brother and a wife’s fear of AIDS, or they pass along a joke about a casket for a baby, they wake us to something we didn’t’ already know, some part of a life that we couldn’t have imagined. They surprise us.