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While medicine is surely among humanity's greatest works, the nature of this greatness is beyond its own power to judge. Medicine must answer to ethics. For Immanuel Levinas, ethics is the primordial call of the Other, whose alterity—beyond appropriation, possession or mastery—originally challenges my unquestioning ipseity and thus precedes all forms of knowledge. This recognition of the priority of the Other is quintessentially manifest in my encounter with his suffering and death. Out of this encounter arises the original demand for curative help—for medicine. Unfortunately, medicine, like all forms of knowledge, by nature veils the ethical imperative presupposed by its very existence. Literature helps lift this veil. With its power to bring close, or reflect, distance as such, literature helps medicine face the absolute alterity of the Other's suffering. Paradoxically, it is through its mirroring that literature points medicine beyond its own reflection.

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The care of the sick centers on the giving and receiving of accounts of illness. Narrative medicine arose at the turn of this century to equip healthcare professionals with the capacity to skillfully receive these accounts—to recognize, absorb, interpret, and be moved to action by the stories patients tell. The Introduction summarizes the field’s emergence from narrative theory and primary healthcare in an effort to heighten the attention of clinicians for their patients, strengthen their perception of a patient’s situation, and deepen the affiliation between them. The field’s scholarly, educational, and clinical missions are summarized, and a précis of each of the book’s chapters is offered.