In current English, the term ‘narrative’ covers a lot of conceptual ground – from an overarching position on some big issue, to all kinds of storytelling, to a general attention to language or metaphor. This chapter argues for narrowing our conception of ‘narrative’ to add value to scholarship in the history and philosophy of science (HPS). This narrower Narrative Science Approach treats narrative as a distinct and complex discursive form, subject to careful technical theorizing in its own right. By using analytical categories from narrative theory, we can identify in rigorous detail how scientific narratives are put together, what might distinguish them from other narrative forms, and the questions they raise for HPS and narrative enquiry. Similarly, when scientists use narrative ways of reasoning, tools from cognitive narratology enable us to reconstruct their imaginative activity. As a reciprocal movement, our Narrative Science Approach promises to enrich narrative studies.

Narrative is ubiquitous in the sciences. Whilst it might be hidden, evident only from its traces, it can be found regularly in scientists’ accounts of their research, and of the natural, human and social worlds they study. Investigating the functions of narrative, it becomes clear that narrative-making provides scientists with a means of making sense of the materials in their field, that narrative provides a means of representing that knowledge and that narrative may even provide the site for scientific reasoning and knowledge claims. Narrative emerges as a ‘general-purpose technology’, used in many different forms in different sites of science, enabling scientists to figure out and to express their scientific knowledge. Understanding scientists’ use of narrative in this way suggests that narrative functions as a bridge between the interventionist practices of science and the knowledge gained from those practices.

The beginning of modern, twentieth-century epidemiology is usually associated with the introduction of mathematical approaches and formal methods to the field. However, since the late nineteenth century, the nascent field of epidemiology not only developed statistical instruments and stochastic models, but also relied on new forms of narrative to make its claims. This chapter will ask how chronologies of outbreaks, the increasing complexity of causal models and statistical and geographical representations were brought together in epidemiological reasoning. The chapter focuses on three outbreak reports from the third plague pandemic as critical examples. Reports grappled with the unexpected return of a devastating menace from the past, while inadvertently shaping the contours of a modern, scientific argument. Epidemiological reasoning emphasized historical dimensions and temporal structures of epidemics and integrated formalized approaches with empirical descriptions while contributing to the growing rejection of mono-causal explanations for epidemics.