This collaborative essay experimentally applies the insights of Mary Shelley's 1818 gothic fantasy Frankenstein to clinical interactions between present-day physicians and the patients they, akin to Shelley's human protagonist, so often seem to bring (back) to life. Because that process is frequently fraught with unspoken elements of ambivalence, disappointment, frustration, and failure, we find in Shelley's speculative fiction less a cautionary tale of overreach than a dynamic parable of the role that the unspoken, the invisible, and the unknown might play in contemporary physician/patient relationships. Playing with that parable, we consider its relevance to four often unacknowledged dynamics that shape physician/patient interaction: commitment to a false binary of life and death; the tyranny of normative aesthetics; shared negative affect; and the ethics of care and care-denial. To "speak with Frankenstein" is, we show, to make space for the otherwise unspeakable. The result is a more complete model of narrative medicine that accommodates to its ideal of open communication and full attention the persistence of what cannot be said, seen, or known--only imagined and approximated.

这篇合作论文实验性地应用了玛丽雪莱 1818 年哥特式幻想科学怪人的见解现在的医生和病人之间的临床互动，类似于雪莱的人类主角，似乎常常使（恢复）生命。因为这个过程经常充满矛盾、失望、挫折和失败等不言而喻的元素，我们在雪莱的投机小说中发现与其说是一个过度扩张的警示故事，不如说是一个关于不言而喻、无形和未知可能扮演的角色的动态寓言在当代医患关系中。玩这个比喻，我们认为它与塑造医生/患者互动的四个经常未被承认的动态相关：对生与死的错误二元的承诺；规范美学的暴政；共同的负面影响；以及护理和拒绝护理的道德规范。“与弗兰肯斯坦交谈“是，我们表明，为其他无法言说的事物腾出空间。结果是一个更完整的叙事医学模型，它适应了开放交流的理想，并充分关注无法说、看到或知道的东西的持久性——只有想象和近似。