This chapter provides a theoretical basis for examining the tension between scientific and lay rationality that continues to undermine attempts to address such vital healthcare issues as vaccine hesitancy or lack of compliance with regulations and test regimes during a pandemic. It outlines the main tenets of the narrative paradigm, acknowledges critical scholarship relating to its applicability in some cases and settings, and demonstrates its usefulness through a variety of examples from different cases of medical controversy relating to recent epidemics such as SARS and HIV. The chapters that follow do not only explain different antagonisms surrounding Covid-19 from the perspective of the narrative paradigm as elaborated by Walter Fisher, but also extend the framework and nuance it in the course of analysis, especially with reference to its application to medical narratives and its potential for offering a point of orientation for medical practitioners and policy makers in the healthcare sector.

This chapter outlines the overall aims and rationale for the book and explains how it differs from two established models in the study of medicine: evidence-based medicine and narrative medicine. It argues that science is inevitably and inextricably embedded in a multitude of narratives told by both scientists and non-scientists and further acknowledges that scientific claims are themselves narratives. Whatever their factual status, scientific statements are ultimately assessed on the basis of people’s lived experience and the values they hold most dear. While accepting that scientific evidence has a key role to play in shaping public policy and should – in an ideal world – be taken seriously by members of the public, the authors argue that it is often mistrusted and/or overridden by considerations that are affective and social in nature. These considerations, in turn, are informed by the narratives to which we are all socialized over many years and in numerous contexts.