Story and plot: clinical case reports as academic stories

Abstract

Clinical case reports constitute a genre specific of healthcare professionals, who write and publish them with educational and research purposes. Unlike other scientific texts, case reports are based on the clinical experience of one or a few patients. This is why they acquire a narrative character and a series of features that lead us to consider them as academic stories. In this article, we try to find out if this consideration is accurate. We review the narrative theory to identify the key element that defines stories with regard to other narrative texts: the plot or intrigue. We confirm the presence of this element in a corpus of written clinical case reports in Catalan, English and Spanish published in magazines from the mental health field.