Restoring the Patient’s Voice- Narrative Medicine and the Re-Humanization of Cancer Care: A Study With Special Reference to the Empirical Gap Identified in The Emperor of All Maladies

Abstract

Siddhartha Mukherjee’s The Emperor of All Maladies is a much-celebrated work on the “biography of cancer”. It traces the historical, scientific, and social evolution of humanity’s battle against one of the deadliest diseases. Despite its meticulous chronicling of the ongoing oncological advances and scientific rivalries, the text accentuates a striking gap in the relative scarcity of patientcentered narratives in the historiography and practice of cancer therapy. Cancer, in the novel, is profusely narrated as a biological and institutional story, that quite often reduces its patients to docile and inactive subjects of biomedical intervention rather than active narrators of their own lived experiences. This research paper examines this omission as a critical and a predominant research gap and positions it within the domain of Health Humanities that stresses upon the amalgamation of literature, ethics, oral narratives and history to humanize clinical practice. This paper argues for a paradigm shift to reframe the outlook on cancer: from treating cancer as a biological battle to understanding it as a lived human experience.