Narrative nature of a medical case report and its coherence

This paper addresses the narrative nature of medical case reports as a factor affecting the coherence of this specialist genre. The paper will show that case reports consist of an established sequence of individual thematic parts that reflect elements of the canonical story according to V. Labov and J. Waletzki (1967). These narrative components, through the peculiar way in which both the patient and the medical issues are presented, support the cohesion of the text. In addition, attention will be paid to the presence of two voices - the voice of medicine and the indirect voice of the patient. This analysis refers to narrative research, the narrative nature of the genre itself (G. Prince 1982) and the concept of voices in medical communication by E. G. Mishler (1984), and has been performed on the example of Polish paediatric case reports.