This article presents narrative medicine as a new field of medical humanities. Narrative medicine has become influential over the world as well as in Denmark in recent years. Narrative medicine aims to counter the often reductionist way patients are perceived and treated in biomedicine and argues for the importance of seeing and hearing patients in the clinical practice as whole, complex persons. Through close reading of literary narratives about illness the medical students are assumed to become less unemphatic, more attuned to self-care and more tolerant towards ambiguity in the clinic.