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This chapter presents “vulnerable reading” as complementary to narrative medicine but representing a different emphasis. Vulnerable reading seeks to help people discover how a literary work can help when they need help. It asks how can literary works become our companions, guiding us, caution-ing us, consoling us, and maybe amusing us. Vulnerable reading is not a clinical intervention; on the contrary, it addresses both ill people and health professionals equally, according to each's need. Because vulnerable reading is not a theory but a practice to be adapted according to individual need, the chapter suggests five aspects of a story that readers might be curious about—what a vulnerable reader might ask as she reads. These involve be-ing interested in the story's characters, the storyworld that is created, the dialogical relations between characters, the characters’ respective vulner-abilities, and the sense of rightness that the characters uphold and the nar-rative conveys. These areas of curiosity are shown in a brief consideration of Shakespeare's tragedy King Lear.
Vulnerable reading works on the opposite side of the street from narrative medi-cine: the side of the street where ill people live. But not only ill people. Vulner-able reading is for all those who are willing to acknowledge that they are strugg-ling to hold on to their sense of self and purpose, and even their desire to live. Some of these people are healthcare workers. Most will be ill people or people who are not immediately sick but whose chronic conditions or disabilities make them vulnerable. Vulnerable reading is about what these people might look for when they read to help them in their different struggles.
Unlike the usage common to narrative medicine, I do not—emphatically not—speak of patients as those who need vulnerable reading. Ill people become patients only during those times when they are being attended by a healthcare Interventionsworker. Vulnerable reading can help people reflect on what happens during those times of medical attendance, but ill people have an extensive life outside of whatever time they spend being patients, just as healthcare workers have lives outside that work. Vulnerable reading seeks to enrich those extensive lives (Frank, 2019).Narrative medicine's core mandate and focus has been teaching student clini-cians—at first medical students and now multiple health professions (Bleakley, 2015; Charon, 2017; Frank, 2017).
The higher the human intellect goes in discovering more and more purposes, the more obvious it becomes that the ultimate purpose is beyond comprehension.
Leo Tolstoy, War and Peace ([1868–9] 2005: 1270)This chapter explores the relation between phronesis in doing social science and what I will call everyday phronesis. A core topic of social scientific study is the dependence of human action on phronesis, understood as people's practical wisdom in dealing with both routine decisions and unexpected contingencies. This practical wisdom seems to have three aspects: it is content, a quality of persons, and a form of action. As content, phronesis is a resource – a stock of experiential knowledge. As a quality of persons, it is what enables acquisition and appropriate use of that knowledge – a capacity. And as action, phronesis necessarily involves doing something – a practice in which experiential knowledge is both used and gained. Having phronesis is iteratively dependent on practising phronesis.
For social science phronesis has to be more than a topic; it is what social scientific study requires from researchers (Flyvbjerg 2001), and what social science seeks to enhance in those whom I will call readers. Real social science is when studying the world has the effect of changing it. This chapter discusses social theories in which the study of everyday practical wisdom works to enhance their readers’ capacity for phronesis.