A logical development: biomedicine’s fingerprints are on the instrument of close reading in Charonian Narrative Medicine
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Narrative Medicine as originated by Rita Charon began as an attempt to redress the unopposed biomedicalisation of the medical profession. Although the movement has been self-positioned as a corrective to deliver an ideal of care, it began within the rhetorical framework of biomedicine and not outside of it. Thus, Narrative Medicine justifies itself in biomedical terms, invoking instrumental rationales for its use. This seeming 'scientification' of narrative is only half of the biomedicine-indebted Narrative Medicine story. An equally important but as-yet unmentioned debt is the quasi-scientific origin story of Narrative Medicine's signature method of close reading. Thus, there is an inherent paradox at the heart of the Narrative Medicine movement: designed to resist a reductive biomedicine, it exists in a dependent relationship on biomedicine at the level of justification and at the level of praxis. Thus, it is an open question if the Narrative Medicine movement is the proper vehicle for a rebalancing of humanities and biomedicine.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.013 | 0.024 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.094 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.017 | 0.018 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.004 | 0.010 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".