A experiência com a doença: da entrevista à narrativa.

This paper emphasizes the importance of narrative as a way of describing life experiences, in the special case of the illness' experience. Its starting point is the narrative as a research tool. The material collected in this interview was twofold: served for training graduate students in interviews and placed the issue of health of a group of workers with diagnoses of chronic diseases like hypertension, diabetes, back pain, etc. We searched for reports made in a single interview, putting the illness in the context of life history, in order to grasp the "experience" of the subject and to solve the problem of disease as users of a health center in a city in São Paulo State. Concerning the organization of the material, we chose the reorganization of oral history by developing a narrative with such information. So this is a narrative of an original narrative that, from a semi-structured interview, was organized as case study, with biographic approach, aiming to observe life history elements, personal illness trajectory, and therapeutic itinerary. We concluded that the narrative represents important resources to produce knowledge, in teaching, research and care perspectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]