Abstract

This paper analyzes narratives presented by adolescents undergoing cancer treatments, their parents, and medical doctors, characterizing the first production concerned with a research project on illness narratives. On the one hand, it is an attempt to explain what such narratives are, what they tell us, and how they are connected to each other under the point of view of language studies; on the other hand, as it searches to comprehend the operating modes of such narratives, it tries to undertake a deeper understanding about what these narratives communicate. As these aspects are made clear, it is intended not only as a collaborative resource for linguistic-discursive studies about “illness narratives”, but also as data provisioning for medical doctors and health professionals to make use of the partial results presented here towards the optimization of their practices.