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The drama of being a doctor

Correspondence to:
Correspondence to:
Dr R Persaud
The Maudsley Hospital, Westways Clinic, 49 St James Road, Croydon CR9 2RR, UK; r.persaud@iop.kcl.ac.uk

Keywords: doctor-patient relationship

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
(William Shakespeare As You Like It II.vii)

One comparatively unusual and perhaps uncomfortable way of thinking about the practice of medicine is that the consultation with a patient is a kind of theatre. The doctor and the patient have their roles, actually encapsulated by the medical sociologist’s Talcott Parson’s conceptualisation of the "sick role"—which the patient plays.¹ What part the doctor adopts has oddly received less attention from medical sociology, partly perhaps because the profession is resistant to the notion that sometimes the consultation entails playacting.

Talcott Parsons idea of the sick role in the 1950s was the first theoretical concept that explicitly concerned medical sociology. In contrast with the biomedical model, which pictures illness as a mechanical . . . [Full text of this article]