There’s an old story about three blind men who encounter an elephant in a field. Each man touches a different part of the creature—its side, its tusks and its trunk—and misidentifies the elephant. This truncated version of a classic parable reminds us that we often fail to create the time in our own lives (and in our professional journals) to share the stories that remove our own intellectual blindness and view our world in its full complexity.

In Dementia: mind, meaning, and the person,¹ we are reminded that western medicine, which dissects the universe into smaller, more easily studied parts, is often guilty of the …