Patients learn from Shakespeare how to expand their capacity to represent and therefore comprehend their experiences of illness and health care. Nursing stu-dents develop high-level literary and creative skills to prepare them to serve their patients. Medical students arrive at complex understandings of that elusive and underrated skill of empathy. Socratic dialogues, imported from the Athens of 2500 years ago, deepen cancer patients’ insight and courage in facing the mean-ings of their ordeals. And such diverse groups as elderly men facing retirement, patients in acute care rehabilitation facilities, alcoholics, and geriatrics patients come together in facilitated groups to write, read together, and enter the narra-tive worlds evoked by stories toward improvement in their health and wellness.

Narrative Medicine in Education, Practice, and Interventions reports the accom-plishments of narrative medicine as studied and practiced in Denmark and else-where. Danish scholars, clinicians, and creative artists are joined by internation-al experts in various branches of literary studies, social sciences, and the medical humanities. Over the course of this collection, the reader gets a high-altitude view of semiotic theory, aesthetic theory of creative writing, and phenomeno-logical expositions on suffering. The reader also gets a ground-level exposure to the teaching of this material to health professions students, patients in nursing homes, and persons seeking recovery from alcoholism and cancer. Several of the essays report on research projects designed to assess the outcomes of narrative interventions in education and clinical practice.

Narrative medicine has evolved into a systems narrative medicine since it is in-creasingly influenced by and influencing global and social processes far afield from actual clinical settings. Systems thinking is becoming more and more prominent in the world of science, the world of global politics, the business world, and the world of human services. It is a conceptual process of itemizing the forces out in the environment that impinge on one's practice and also the processes out in the world that might be influenced by what one does. For nar-rative medicine, this means acknowledging the influences of social factors like racism, economic factors like health insurance reimbursement for care, and cul-tural factors like the rise of storytelling in health care. Taking cues from systems biology and complexity science, narrative medicine recognizes itself conceptually and practically as chains of interlocking systems operating at a range of scales from one-on-one clinician-client relationships to vast ecosystems and global economies.