"Forty acres of cotton waiting to be picked": Medical Students, Storytelling, and the Rhetoric of Healing

"'Forty acres of cotton waiting to be picked': Medical Students, Storytelling, and the Rhetoric of Healing," divides medical students' stories into four categories, including stories focusing on 1) factual matters of medical practice; 2) identity; 3) underlying assumptions of medical practice; and 4) the nature of healing. Through their stories, medical students negotiate the difficulties of medical school and move toward an understanding of healing rooted as deeply in language and its rhetorical acts as in the biomedical sciences.