Narrative as technology: the role of the medical humanities in responding to emerging biomedical technologies

Often, the medical humanities are framed as a corrective to various instrumental inclinations within biomedicine. The humanities, according to this formulation, represent a point of departure from instrumental thinking, a means by which the arts intervene to combat biomedicine's more technological tendencies. Drawing from philosophers of technology Bernard Stiegler and Martin Heidegger, I challenge this formulation, arguing that narrative-a multidisciplinary tool of the medical humanities-is itself a tool and therefore a technology. Rather than asking if narrative is a technology, scholars within the medical humanities would be better served by asking what kind of technology we wish narrative to be. The answer that I forward-explicitly instrumental-is that narrative is a constitutive technology, a tool by which humans reinstantiate order in the wake of technological disruption. Rather than resisting technology, narrative provides a tool for responding to technological change. As biomedicine continues its own technological turn-consider, for example, the rapid development of medical applications of generative artificial intelligence and the emergence of precision medicine-such a lens has become increasingly necessary, equipping the medical field with tools to expand analysis of emerging technologies beyond the twin lenses of costliness and effectiveness.