Medicine and Its Double: Doing dramaturgy with medical students in an Australian teaching hospital

Abstract

This thesis examines the relationship between aesthetic performance practices and clinical experiences in medical education. Social reforms through the past fifty years have encouraged medical schools to adopt arts-based interventions into their formal curricula. Medical humanities scholars along with arts and health practitioners frame the arts as augmenting students’ interpersonal, professional and intercultural capabilities in diverse, person-centred healthcare systems. While resisting an art versus science binary, advocates for applying performing arts in medical education still tend to see students as 'performing roles', a theatre-as-metaphor model persisting from mid-twentieth century studies foundational to medical sociology. In doing so, they can neglect how students participate in embodied, relational performances grounded in clinical ecologies. Drawing on nine months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted by a theatre director in an Australian teaching hospital, this thesis asks how non-metaphorical performances emerge in clinical settings. By identifying performances as practices enacted beyond the therapeutic requirements of hospital work, this thesis adapts a practice theory-informed methodology of 'doing dramaturgy' to analyse how students and others co-create bedside tutorials, long case interviews and long case presentations as distinct genres of clinical performance. This study finds that rather than theatrical representations of professional comportment, these performances double as representational instances of students ‘becoming doctors’ which simultaneously embody more-than-representational doings of ‘enacting medicine’. The significant contribution of doing dramaturgy in clinical settings provides a provocation and language for destabilising assumptions about how medical and performing arts practices entangle, including an aesthetics of medical work which guides how students and doctors transfer patients between one another in hospital workplaces.