Diagnosis Narratives and the Healing Ritual in Western Medicine

The dominance of ‘illness narratives’ in narrative healing studies has tended to mean that the focus centres around the healing of the individual. Meza proposes that this emphasis is misplaced and the true focus of cultural healing should lie in managing the disruption of disease and death (cultural or biological) to the individual’s relationship with society. Using a novel combination of narrative theory and cognitive anthropology to represent the ethnographic data, Meza’s ethnography is a valuable contribution in a field where ethnographic records related to medical clinical encounters are scarce.