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Narrative and metaphor in health geographies

In July 1996, the international conference `Narrative and metaphor across the disciplines' was held in Auckland, New Zealand. Participants from 20 countries explored the processes of `storying' and the pervasive use of metaphor throughout the discourses of everyday life. Later the same month, the 7th international symposium in medical geography was held in Portsmouth, England. This was a smaller and less interdisciplinary gathering, yet there were discernible traces of concern with narrative and metaphor within the papers and discussions. In this review, I seek to explore these concerns within emerging health geographies, extending the themes of my previous two reviews which considered `making space for difference' within medical geography, and the (albeit modest) trend towards embracing the `Other' in studies of disease and illness (Kearns, 1995; 1996). I begin by considering narrative, and the strengthening resolve by geographers to be the (co)creators of storied knowledge(s) of health experience. I then examine the nature and uses of metaphor in medical geography. In a third section, I consider some of the ethical and practical challenges of exploring narrative and metaphor. A final section briefly raises some cautionary concerns related to this expression of the `cultural turn' in health geography.