Telling Stories About Stories
This is a story about stories.
Like any good story, we’re going to wander down a few storied paths.
One of the paths leads back to three award-winning stories. Remarkable stories by remarkable physicians who take seriously the power of stories. Who have written powerful stories.
One of the story’s paths is about the importance of stories for human health and well-being, as thought about from the perspectives of some very different “storytellers” – if we can call a Indigenous author/radio-humorist and an award winning professor of clinical medicine at the College of Physicians and Surgeons of Columbia University, “storytellers”.
Which, for the purposes of this story, we will.
One of the stories, the story I’m going to begin with, is a story about a storyteller who ends up working in a Faculty of Medicine. This story, the story where we will begin, might best be understood as a story that starts in a tiny community on two tiny islands upon which most people in Canada – indeed most people in the world – will never have never set foot. Many people won’t have even heard of these islands, these islands balanced in almost-always grey and stormy waters far off the northwest-coast of British Columbia, further north indeed than parts of Alaska.