Case study

Drama has been used as a medium for instruction within medical education, with particular focus on illness-centred performance.1 At the University of California, Davis, faculty from the Department of English and Division of Internal Medicine informally read scenes from various plays alongside medical students in hour-long sessions. Attendant discussion from students and faculty focus on understanding and approaching these characters as ‘patients’. Similar to doctors interacting with Vivian Bearing, diagnosed with terminal ovarian cancer in Edson's Wit, students appreciated empathising with their characters. Additionally, students obtained a novel perspective by reading for a character from a different background. Their feedback from these sessions reveals that this exercise produces a deeper level of understanding characters from a sociocultural perspective rather than a physiological one.

Angels in America is a story of homosexuality, religion and politics set during the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s in New York City. This was a period of paranoia for …