I have constructed recontextualizations of a doctor’s visit in order to demonstrate the ways that medical practice is a series of multimodal recontexualizations of narratives within the polycontextual spaces of different overlapping activity systems. By using the personal narrative, I suggest the disparity between patient narratives and medical professional’s notes, and the need not only to acknowledge the gap between those diverse understandings of medical practice, but also to acknowledge the value of the patients’ ways of knowing. By looking at these narratives through the lens of sociohistoric theory and developing an understanding of the multiplicities involved in these practices, I aim to begin to draw attention to these gaps and overlaps.

I seek to pay attention to the mediated activities of the persons in the systems, drawing on the new map for rhetorical activity in the core text. I consider these multiple representations of activity in the narratives and notes, the way these representations are distributed (or not) and received (or not) by persons in the overlapping systems, because this richer map allows me to explore the complexity of this literate activity and attribute more attention to patients’ ways of knowing.