The Center for Narrative Medicine and Medical Humanities at the Peking University Health Science Center was officially established in 2008 within the historic School of Health Humanities, an academic institution dedicated to the humanistic dimensions of care since 1912. The formal birth of the Center marks an important step in the recent history of Chinese medicine: for the first time, narrative, literature, philosophy, ethics, and medical anthropology were brought together within a unified and continuous project, offering students and health professionals a broader understanding of clinical practice.
From its inception, the Center has sought to build a dialogue between the languages of care, connecting clinical medicine with narrative theory and the humanistic tradition. Under the leadership of Professor Guo Liping, it has become a place where academic research and clinical experience genuinely meet. Physicians, philosophers, linguists, nurses, sociologists, psychologists, and scholars of literature work side by side to understand how the stories of patients and professionals can reshape the meaning and quality of care.
National recognition of the Center’s role became even more evident in 2023, when Professor Guo and her team promoted the Expert Consensus on Narrative Medicine in China. Developed through a rigorous Delphi process, this document established a broad, systematic, and open conceptual framework capable of connecting narrative practices, attention to the patient’s voice, and the integration of narrative medicine with evidence-based medicine and precision medicine.
The Second Peking University International Narrative Medicine Conference, held on 15–16 November 2025, showcased the fruits of this long journey. The rich and articulate program included keynote lectures, parallel sessions, empirical studies, philosophical reflections, and interdisciplinary contributions, encompassing perspectives from traditional Chinese medicine, psychology, social sciences, health communication, and emerging technologies applied to care.
Among the most original plenary presentations, Jürgen Pieters offered “Taking Tolstoy to the Doctor: What If Ivan Ilyich Was Your Patient?”, an intense reflection on how literature can interrogate contemporary clinical practice through the lens of great authors. Penelope Scott contributed a new perspective on illness imagery in the digital world with her lecture “Illness Metaphors in AI Art Creation: A Health Humanities Perspective”, exploring how artificial intelligence constructs and transforms—sometimes crystallizes into stereotypes—the emotional dimensions of illness.
Among the international contributions, my lecture “Binary Stars of Meaning and Evidence: Bridging Narrative Medicine and Evidence-Based Medicine” explored the relationship between data science and the science of stories, framed through the astronomical metaphor of binary stars. In this perspective, evidence and narrative are not in opposition; rather, they can illuminate each other within everyday clinical practice.
Marco Cordero’s presentation on obesity narratives enriched the cultural dialogue by showing how even highly stigmatized conditions can be understood anew through narrative inquiry.
The Italian presence was made visible by a symbolic detail: in the conference proceedings distributed to participants appeared the Chinese edition of my book Narrative Medicine: Bridging the Gap Between Health Humanities and Evidence-Based Care, published by Springer in 2016. The cover, across all its editions—English, Italian, Chinese, and Korean—has always featured the image of a bridge, a symbol of dialogue between different disciplinary and cultural worlds. Finding that bridge again in Beijing, in a context where similar reflections were shared by scholars from multiple continents, gave the impression that the metaphor was taking on a collective life of its own.
The attitude of the participants contributed decisively to the quality of the conference. Their deep listening and genuine openness to understanding different perspectives reflected cultural roots in which the relationship between body, place, and narrative is centuries old. These roots intertwined naturally with contemporary models from Europe, the Americas, and Japan.
The Center directed by Guo Liping works precisely in this direction: building a cultural and clinical fabric that does not reduce health to its biological dimension alone, but embraces it as a complex ecosystem. Illness, while central to therapeutic pathways, becomes an entry point into a broader landscape made of lived experience, family relationships, social dynamics, languages, symbols, and meanings. Narrative medicine, integrated with empirical research and scientific evidence, helps professionals recognize all these dimensions, supporting the creation of stronger and more conscious relationships with patients—and offering healthcare systems an opportunity for cultural renewal.
The 2025 conference made it clear that the international narrative medicine community is moving toward a shared vision: care as encounter, health as a balance between meaning and data, and clinical practice as an interplay between scientific precision and attention to the singularity of each patient’s story.
The Beijing Center, established in 2008 and grown through years of interdisciplinary collaboration, stands today as an essential point of passage along this global path. It is an open threshold between different worlds—a bridge of thought and practice connecting languages and competencies without blending them, allowing each to shine in its own light.
And perhaps it is precisely in this capacity to connect, rather than absorb, that its deepest strength can be found.
