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  • 17 - Anecdotes: Epistemic Switching in Medical Narratives

  • from VI - Narrative Sensibility and Argument
  • Edited by Mary S. Morgan, London School of Economics and Political Science, Kim M. Hajek, London School of Economics and Political Science, Dominic J. Berry, London School of Economics and Political Science
  • Book:
    Narrative Science
    Published online:
    16 September 2022
    Print publication:
    06 October 2022, pp 351-370
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  • Summary

    This chapter examines the narrative and epistemic coordinates that underpin the way anecdotes notice and reason about the situations they recount. A selection of anecdotes from medical publications over the last two-and-a-half centuries is examined for the way they marshal their materials, present and reframe information, entertain explanations and bring situations and conceptual frameworks for their understanding into close relationship with each other. Through swapping perspectives on their objects of contemplation in heuristics centring on observational and conceptual vantage points, anecdotes bring before their audience’s eyes scenes viewed in a new light. By changing the domains in which phenomena become explicable, anecdotes effect ‘epistemic switches’ – for example, from a biomedical to a sociopsychological domain or from a non-medical to a pathological one. In highly abbreviated tales of the unexpected, their ‘nutshell narratives’ persuade prime audiences that prior assumptions and understandings require to be adjusted in the light of experience.