This essay will examine some of the narrative practices emerging in the health care professions — medicine, nursing, social work, and psychotherapy. It is always understood that the most fertile and clinically salient information, derived about patients, comes from listening to them talking about their illnesses. Nonetheless, medicine’s recent past is marked by not so much a suspicion of as a dismissal of word in diagnosing and treating disease. Of late, medicine has found sustenance from such fields as trauma studies, oral history, and testimony work. Finally, it is understood that health care professionals' tasks include the duty to bear witness as others tell of trauma and loss. Narrative medicine becomes a heady, brainy, compassionate, corporeal practice that can heal the patient and nourish the doctor at the same time — by virtue of the talk.