The emancipation of biographical medicine

Resilience among doctors who work in challenging areas: a qualitative study

“…28 While all these dimensions are apparent in the approaches of the doctors in the present study, the strongest was the patient-asperson. The narratives or cultural backstories of individual patients -their 'biographies' 29 -were evident in the doctors' accounts of adjusting to, understanding, and responding to each patient's context and needs.…”

Professional legitimacy claims in the multidisciplinary workplace: the case of heart failure care

“…Though GPs have traditionally viewed themselves as offering holistic care, specialist nurses claimed that dedicated heart failure clinics offered patients a personalised service that included close monitoring of their condition, a service unlikely to be provided in primary care. Although cardiology has not traditionally aspired to delivering a 'biographical' style of medicine (Armstrong 1979) and indeed none of our cardiologists emphasised a patient-centred approach as a central theme in their management strategy, the specialist nurses claimed to practise exactly this, often challenging the capacity of doctors to offer a holistic approach (10/10):…”

Paradigmas médicos e Atenção Primária à Saúde: vigilância da população e/ou produção de vida?

“…Other forms of health care provision supported this binary divide as the hospital depended on peripheral health care workers (such as general practitioners) to make the preliminary identification of pathology and arrange for admission to a hospital bed. Inevitably, therefore, non-hospital alternative health care was subservient to the hospital; indeed, it almost owed its very existence to the hospital 'system' and the pathological forms of disease that underpinned it 10 .…”

“…The Brazilian Collective Health movement and, on it, the debates about clinical practice and the management of the health care after the 1980's, seems to us that are partially a product of those paradigmatic forces that began to impact on both the practice and organisation of medicine about half a century ago in countries like the UK. They have as a common ground an emphasis on the biographical elements in the patient's problem that represent a significant break from the old clinic-pathological hospital medicine 10 .…”