Medicine as Theatre, Theatre as Medicine

Responding to a need among health humanities scholars and clinicians to grapple with medicine''s longstanding relationship to theatre, this open access book argues there are deep connections between theatre and medicine which guide transformative insights in both disciplines. While contemporary theatre has embraced its links to the healing arts, doctors and patients may prefer to forget the relationship between theatre and medicine, but this book argues that understanding the performative aspects of caregivers'' and patients'' roles can actually help improve medical outcomes. It features chapters and interviews not only from scholars in the medical and health humanities and theatre, performance, and disability studies, but also from key stakeholders such as doctors, medical educators, disability activists, home caregivers and patients. Moving beyond prevailing applications of the arts in narrative medicine and medical education, the volume maintains that patients'' and doctors'' performances cannot be understood in isolation, nor does interpretation happen in only one direction. The contact that occurs between patient and caregiver makes illness an ensemble drama. Properly understood, this art of illness lends the doctor-patient interaction emotional and therapeutic dimensions that transcend the purely biomedical framework of cure. It encompasses multiple genres of theatre and performance-spoken drama, performance art, object performance, physical theatre, and medical performances on television. The first two sections examine performative aspects of the clinical encounter. The third and fourth sections explore the potential and the danger of theatre''s healing power. By analyzing the ensemble drama of illness, by proposing enhancements to medicine''s "hidden curriculum" through role-play, dramaturgy, and actor-training in theatre and social performance theory, and by bringing patients into the conversation, the book offers rigorous research and real-world benefits. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. ...

List of contents

List of Illustrations
List of Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction
Section 1: Fashioning the Doctor's Character
Chapter 1 - Authenticity, Ritual, and Medical Performance
A Conversation between Timothy McGinnis and Arthur Kleinman
Chapter 2 - Medical Training and Character Development: The Hidden Curriculum in Learning to Act
Deborah Ocholi (McMaster University, Canada)
Chapter 3 - Puppetry and Medical Performance
An Interview with Rachel Warr
Section 2: Patients and the Art of Illness
Chapter 4 - Performing the Art of Illness: How Patients Can Ail Well and Caregivers Can Help
Alice Flaherty (Massachusetts General Hospital and Harvard Medical School, USA)
Chapter 5 - The Ensemble Arts of Healing and Learning: Forum Theatre and Pre-Texts
Doris Sommer (Harvard University, USA)
Chapter 6 - Rehearsing Failure: What Theatre Can Teach Medicine About Being Present
Bianca Dahl (University of Toronto Scarborough, Canada) and Philip Davy McKee (Independent scholar, Canada)
Section 3: Caregivers
Chapter 7 - Nursing Tactics: Voice, Touch, Scent
An Interview with Adele Vogelsang
Chapter 8 - What Part of the Stage Are You Standing On?
An Interview with George Anderson
Chapter 9 - "I Like to Act Vicariously on Behalf of People"
An Interview with Marcus Coates
Section 4: The Pasts of Performative Medicine
Chapter 10 - Medical Influences on Modern Theatre and Theatrical Influences on Modern Medicine with Is There a Doctor in the House? Medicine and the Making of Modern Drama (2008)
An Interview with Stanton B. Garner, Jr.
Chapter 11 - "250,000 Unnecessary Deaths": Theatricalizing the National Health Care Debate in Broadway's Medicine Show (1940)
Kirsten E. Shepherd (St Catherine's College, Oxford University, UK)
Chapter 12 - Performance and Medical Education: Bridging the Gap Between Public and Private Phrenology
Marlis Schweitzer (York University, Canada) and Sara Masciotra-Milstein (Independent scholar, UK)
Section 5: Performative Medicine in Contemporary Theatre and Drama
Chapter 13 - Bedside Manner
Corrine Botz (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, USA)
Chapter 14 - Theatre for Social Change in the Dementia Context
A Conversation between Pia Kontos and Sherry Dupuis
Chapter 15 - Beyond the Cost of Care: Connection, Disability, and Embodied Reciprocity in Martyna Majok's Cost of Living
Katherine Williams (University of Toronto, Canada)
Chapter 16 - "Knots That I Can't Seem to Easily Undo": Playwright Matthew MacKenzie on Making Illness Dramatically Interesting
An Interview with Matthew MacKenzie
Conclusion - A Performative Future for Healthcare

Index

About the author

Marlene Goldman is Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. She is a writer, filmmaker, and interdisciplinary scholar, co-editor of Critical Humanities and Ageing: Forging Interdisciplinary Dialogues (2022) and author of Performing Shame: Simulating Stigmatized Minds and Bodies (2023). Her website is https://marlenegoldman.ca/.Alice Flaherty is Associate Professor of neurology and psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, USA. She studies illness behavior and creative motivation. She was a trial site principle investigator of the first successful genetic treatment of Parkinson's Disease. She was featured in the award-winning podcast The Great God of Depression, and Oscar-qualifying film Bedside Manner.Lawrence Switzky is Associate Professor of English at the University of Toronto, Canada. He is the editor of the journal Modern Drama, Shakespearean Theatre and the Non-Human World (2019) and a volume of Bernard Shaw’s plays of the late 1890s (2021).John Lutterbie was Professor Emeritus in the Department of Theatre Arts and the Department of Art at Stony Brook University, USA. He was the director of the International Network for Cognition, Theatre and Performance and with Nicola Shaughnessy was the series editor of the Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues series.Nicola Shaughnessy is Professor of Performance at the University of Kent. She is Director of the Research Centre for Cognition, Kinesthetics and Performance and is leading the AHRC funded project 'Imagining Autism.'
She is the author of Applying Performance (2012), Gertrude Stein (2007) and co-editor of Margaret Woffington (2008).

Product details

• Authors: Alice Flaherty, Marlene Goldman, Lawren Switzky
• Assisted by: Alice Flaherty (Editor), Goldman Marlene (Editor), Lawrence Switzky (Editor), John Lutterbie (Editor of the series), Nicola Shaughnessy (Editor of the series)
• Publisher: Methuen Drama
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Release: 11.06.2026
• EAN: 9781350460720
• ISBN: 978-1-350-46072-0
• No. of pages: 400
• Series: Performance and Science: Interdisciplinary Dialogues
• Subjects: Humanities, art, music > Art > Theatre, ballet; Natural sciences, medicine, IT, technology > Medicine > General; MEDICAL / History, PERFORMING ARTS / Theater / History & Criticism, History of Medicine, Theatre Studies