Traditional methods of teaching medical, history taking focus heavily on accurate and detailed fact gathering. From the start of their training, medical students learn the paramount importance of obtaining key facts, such as the characteristics of the chief complaint, the exact chronology of events in the patient's history, and the pertinent positives and negatives in the review of systems. No doubt such facts are important. However, we as clinical teachers tend to de-emphasise the narrative aspects of listening to, and transcribing, the patient's history. Standard and classic teaching texts on medical history taking emphasise the importance of obtaining the patient's story,and extracting the pertinent details from it, without focusing on the ways that stories work.
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