Using Narratives to Express ‘Total Pain’

Having set out the possible uses and abuses of narrative in relation to ‘total pain’, this chapter examines how integral narrative might be in communicating ‘total pain’ to others. Rather than using formal medical cases, Cicely Saunders established the need for hospice and palliative care through anecdotes like Mrs Hinson’s, emphasising patient voice and everyday details to highlight the personhood of dying patients. Saunders’s reliance on anecdotes in print indicates her publications’ origins in her many public lectures but also the predominantly oral culture underpinning the kind of care she was advocating. However, Saunders later rubbished anecdotal evidence despite her own continued use of anecdotes to communicate the holism of ‘total pain’, suggesting aspects of ‘total pain’ resist being evidenced by either conventional data or long-form narrative case studies