On Wednesday, 18th November, Lodovica Bo, a Narrative Medicine practitioner, will deliver a seminar at the Centre for the Humanities and Health. Please join us in Bush House, South East Wing 4.17 for this in-person event; tea, coffee and cold drinks will be provided.

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This session goes behind the curtain of narrative medicine to show how it works, and where it doesn’t.

Drawing on workshops with nurse leaders, nurse scholars and veterans in suicide-prevention settings, Lodovica Bo examines the architecture of a narrative medicine workshop as a designed space. She considers the small, often invisible decisions through which vulnerability is made safe: the use of a text as a “third object” that mediates disclosure, the convention of responding to personal writing “as if it were fiction”, and the facilitator’s calibration of a prompt to the particular room, its fatigue, its history and its capacity to hold what is opened.

The session then engages the limits of narrative, from Galen Strawson’s argument against narrativity to Arthur Frank’s recognition, through the chaos narrative, that some suffering resists being told as a story. The talk proposes a shift from narrative competence towards narrative humility, after Sayantani DasGupta, and introduces the idea of narrative elasticity: the recognition that meaning moves with the position of the teller, the language in which a story is told, and the form it is allowed to take.

Informed by a bilingual practice in Italian and English, the session argues that the work of narrative medicine lies less in mastering a story than in remaining open to what it has not yet said.

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Lodovica Bo is a narrative medicine practitioner, journalist and co-founder of Narrative Echoes, a consultancy that supports clinicians, students and organisations through reflective practice, storytelling and co-design.

She holds an MS in Narrative Medicine from Columbia University. There, she and co-founder Beth Cavenaugh were awarded the Columbia Fellowship Narrative Echoes: Restoring Humanity in Healthcare to develop a framework supporting nurses and preventing burnout.

She has designed and led programmes for nurse leaders at NYU Langone and nurse scholars at Hunter College, and led narrative medicine sessions at a veterans’ suicide-prevention retreat. She has also worked as a researcher at Planetree.

She spent over a decade in journalism and communication, including at Condé Nast’s group, writing her own column on food and sustainability. She writes articles and memoir in Italian and English and lives in London.

narrativeechoes.com · info@narrativeechoes.com