Dramatised medical consultations: What are they like and how can we use them

Abstract

Healthcare is a central part of life, and consequently contexts of healthcare have long been a fertile source of drama, including the long series of stage plays, films and TV series ranging, say, from Molière’s The Imaginary Invalid to Dominic Minghella’s Doc Martin. Medical dramas may involve many different dramatic elements, e.g. suspense, tragedy, comedy, romance; and they involve a wide range of healthcare practitioners with many different character traits and forms of bedside manner — e.g. idealists (e.g. The Citadel), sadists (e.g. The Marathon Man), misanthropes (e.g. House M.D.). Here we propose to examine examples of dramatizations of medical consultations, focussing on the portrayal of the doctorpatient relationships — against the background of studies of actual doctor-patient consultations, and the growing concern with the quality of care and safety, patient experiences and the focus on patient-centred or relationship centred care (e.g. Matthiessen, 2013; Slade et al., 2015).Dramatic portrayals of doctor-patient relationships are interesting in their own right as part of the study of plays, films and TV series as manifestations of verbal art with literary themes (cf. Hasan, 1985); but the study of such portrayals can also give us good examples to use in accounts of medical consultations e.g. in the context of in-service training or basic training, complementing re-enacted consultations based on authentic healthcare encounters. We will draw examples from dramatizations where the doctor’s attitude towards and engagement with the patient are crucial to the dramatic development (often manifestations of the tension between field-based goals and tenor-based goals in healthcare) — including instalments of MD House (see Law, 2017) and Priestley’s Last Holiday. Based on our analysis of such examples, we can develop an archive of illustrations of good and bad consultations. Supplementing work within “narrative medicine”, this is thus a contribution to “dramatized medicine” (cf. Bonamigo & Destefani, 2010; Turow, 2010).