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Medicine and the Silent Oracle: An Exercise in Uncertainty

Abstract

This article describes a simple in-class exercise in reading and writing that, by asking participants to write their own endings for a short narrative taken from the Journal of the American Medical Association, prompts them to reflect on the problem of uncertainty in medicine and to apply the literary-critical techniques of close reading both to the content and the form of a story that describes and enacts the challenges of making decisions in the face of uncertain knowledge.

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