Meghan O'Rourke

Meghan O'Rourke is a journalist, author, poet, and editor of The Yale Review, as well as Professor in the Practice of English and Creative Writing at Yale. She is the author of The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness and has been a moderator and speaker on patient storytelling, chronic illness, and medicine at Aspen Ideas: Health.

Patient Stories Expose Medicine’s Failure to Hear Illness

Patients in the discussion described arriving in medicine through identities already waiting for them: anxious woman, easygoing patient, bad patient, racialized risk, redemptive survivor. Meghan O’Rourke, Jonathan Gleason and Walela Nehanda argue that patient stories matter because they contest those imposed narratives and reveal what clinical categories can miss. The piece makes the case that patient testimony can expose diagnostic uncertainty, racism and structural neglect, but that listening requires time, resources and systems capable of receiving what patients know.

The Aspen InstituteJun 26, 202618 min read