ABSTRACT
The authors consider in this chapter that medical practice and education are in a time of transition, emerging from a history of unchallenged medical authority towards a compassionate health care service that is values based and patient centred. This transition is not linear. Medical students must negotiate often dissonant institutional and moral pressures, performing moment to moment and ‘becoming’ doctors through public enactments. This chapter develops a dramaturgical method for understanding the complexity of these performative enactments, towards fostering more compassionate health care. The basis for this method comprises three concepts: caring for others is perpetual and radical performativity, observing medical performances reveals what students ‘exclude’ or ‘erase’ moment-to-moment as part of their becoming doctors and an ekphrastic mode of writing affords readers a care-based representation of complex medical student performativity. The authors provide three ekphrastic vignettes as examples, based on a theatre-maker’s observations of medical students at a major metropolitan Australian teaching hospital.
