Origins and Development of Narrative-Based Medicine.

Abstract: In the early days of medicine, diagnosis was based on what a patient told the Hippocratic doctor. With the establishment of hospitals and their spread over the 18th century, objective data collection about disease began to be regarded as fundamental, with a patient's narrative taking second place. Over time, disease increasingly began to coincide with a biological entity that could be objectively observed and quantified, while medicine became a science on a par with physics and chemistry.