On the afternoon of Friday, July 7th, 2023, the 117th Peking University Medical Humanities Forum was held at Room 709, Yifu Teaching Building, Peking University Health Science Center. Yu Yangyang, Deputy Director of the Medical Humanities Academy, Shenzhen University Health Science Center was invited to deliver a lecture entitled “Design and Exploration of Medical Humanities Practice Curriculum Based on Narrative Medicine—Taking the First-class Undergraduate Social Practice Course in Guangdong Province: Warm Medicine as an Example”. Professor Guo Liping (School of Health Humanities, Peking University) chaired the lecture. More than 20 teachers and students from the departments of Language and Culture in Medicine and so on attended this lecture.

Dr. Yu’s lecture consisted of four parts. In the first part, Dr. Yu introduced the design idea of narrative medicine curriculum. The curriculum can be divided into two stages: in the first stage, the focus of clinical practice is to train students’ narrative skills in the “cognition, absorption and interpretation” of stories through life experiencing and story capturing. In the second stage, the focus of social practice is to cultivate students’ ability to understand patients’ pain stories deeply and “respond to them”.

In the second part, Dr. Yu introduced the content of the curriculum. The first stage of the curriculum is for junior medical students, who are freshmen or sophomores. In this stage, it includes theoretical teaching (introduction to narrative medicine, life education, parallel medical record discussion, literary work appreciation) and social practice (observing and learning at the bases, life experiencing, interviewing and writing stories in one’s life, parallel medical record discussion). The second stage of the curriculum is about practice, which is planed to be carried out among medical students in their sophomore to senior years. The practice is operated in the form of student clubs, and the objects of practice include special populations such as patients, children, pregnant women, and the elderly. In addition, the practical also serves the broadest range of grassroots community health.

In the third part, Dr. Yu introduced the evaluation of the curriculum. The forms of evaluation include: the observation logs of the students from Shenzhen University Health Science Center, the records of social practice, parallel medical records and final materials (which includes practice reports, case reports and formative evaluations). After that, Dr. Yu emphasized the significant value of narrative medicine in clinical practice with three specific cases.

In the fourth part, Dr. Yu talked about what she has gained from this curriculum. She pointed out that narrative medicine is not a supplement or repair to modern (biological) medicine, but a re-examination and practice of medicine from a higher starting point. It is a new model and perspective of medicine. The emergence of narrative medicine marks the transition from modern medicine to postmodern medicine.

In the question and answer session, a heated discussion on the issues of: the case reports, the observation logs of the students from Shenzhen University Health Science Center, the outline of interview, teaching subjects, ethical considerations in practice, resource integration of the curriculum, the system guarantee and so forth, was carried out among Dr. Yu and the audience.

In the end, Professor Guo Liping gave a high appraisal to the curriculum of narrative medicine in Medical Humanities Academy, Shenzhen University Health Science Center. In addition, Dr. Yu expressed gratitude to Professor Guo Liping’s team for systematically introducing narrative medicine to Peking University Health Science Center, and conducting localized theoretical construction and practice.

Department of Language and Culture in Medicine