It seems a truism that reading literature can help physicians better understand themselves and their patients. However, Charon and colleagues' arguments for applying the methods of literary studies to medical practice were unconvincing [1].

The authors suggest that physicians should analyze their patients' histories as if they were fictional literary narratives. Literature is written to entertain and enlighten. However, physicians take patients' histories to learn about past events relevant to diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. It is unclear why Charon and colleagues consider methods appropriate to analyzing fiction to be the best ways to understand narratives of factual events. Would not methods from history, psychology, or the information sciences be more appropriate?

Do the authors have data to substantiate their sweeping assertions about the value of techniques from literary studies to medicine? These include statements that literary analysis skills will "help physicians to ... arrive at accurate diagnoses, and to choose and work toward appropriate clinical goals"; and "through narrative knowledge, the physician can better understand patients' stories of sickness, thereby strengthening diagnostic accuracy and therapeutic effectiveness ... ."

Can the authors define such confusing terms as "longitudinal acts of ethical discernments," "the genres of medicine," "logicoscientific knowledge," "a narrativist turn," "narratability, temporality, and plot," "contextualize and particularize ethical issues," and "the storyteller's verisimilitude within a fully rendered universe"?

The authors do not explain the concepts that underlie the techniques of literary criticism or how they work. For example, they describe the deconstructionist who "looks between the lines of texts, suspicious that any external coherence hides inner chaos." Do the medical history and chart mask inner chaos?

The authors assert that "basic research and clinical research and are now recognized to rely in part on narrative ways of knowing: The development and confirmation of scientific hypotheses are guided by plot and intention." Can they defend this contention? Some researchers have criticized literary studies as profoundly antiscientific [2].