Clinical Narratives (Benner)

Clinical narratives, in Benner's framework, are not anecdotes or case reports but a specific genre of knowledge transmission essential to the development and maintenance of expertise. When an experienced nurse tells the story of the infant who was 'too quiet,' she is not merely reporting what happened—she is performing an act of knowledge transfer that conveys the embodied, perceptual, emotional dimensions of expert practice that no protocol or algorithmic summary can carry. The narrative preserves the situational particularity (this patient, this moment), the perceptual texture (what the wrongness felt like), and the emotional weight (the nurse's fear, her insistence despite skepticism) that make the story formative for listeners whose own paradigm cases have prepared them to hear it. Benner documented that expert practitioners spend significant time telling each other these stories, often informally, creating a narrative commons through which the tacit dimension of expertise circulates. AI-generated clinical summaries are more efficient and comprehensive but strip away precisely the elements that give narratives their developmental power.