ABSTRACT
This chapter explains about the gap, the tendency to understand performance in medicine as a form of faking. It argues that the gap springs in part from anxieties that lie at the core of modern medicine, the uneasy awareness of how far short both medical practice and patient lived experience fall from the ideal of physician authority and scientific certainty. The chapter presents ways in which such a merging of performing arts and medical performance can manifest through a series of shifts via the subjunctive mode. In the early twentieth century, medical education narrowed to training students in scientific methods. The ‘theatre’ has been a foundational metaphor for sociological theories of medical practice. Medical students can be tender, tearful and courageous when attending simulated patients at a simulated car crash or terrorist attack. In the medical humanities, there has long been concern about the alienating effects of replacing forms of touch, percussion and auscultation, with technology and flows of data.
