ARDEO: Chronicling the Lived Experience of Injury from Patient to Physician to Public Jules Odendahl-James (bio) Narrative medicine posits that a healthcare professional’s medical knowledge and practice are enriched by their study of and investment in narrative theory and practice.1 While the specifics of this claim are still being studied, debated, codified, and challenged, it has become a widely accepted truism among narrative medicine proponents that the patient’s experiences, conveyed via stories, anecdotes, or other means of self-portraiture, provide key, credible evidence of a medical condition’s appearance, treatment, recovery, and endurance. Rather than a text to be read, studied, and categorized, the patient in the narrative medicine view is a dynamic force who shapes the form, content, and reception of what becomes a shared story of an injury or illness with a collective protagonist, whether patient, caregiver, or healthcare professional. Narrative medicine embraces the personal, the subjective. Such a position is not without risk; clinical standards for healthcare and practice are rigorously maintained and regulated for good reason. In search of remedy or relief, we want scientific certainty, not doubt. Narrative medicine, however, argues that the turn to story, to personal experience, does not exist in opposition to scientific rigor, but rather is another domain of attention that provides both patient and physician a fuller picture of what illness or injury is based on its lived conditions. Rita Charon, one of the leading authors, proponents, and instructors of narrative medicine practices, argues that educating physicians about narrative through literary coursework and writing exercises, including those that might comprise the medical record, helps them “follow the patient’s narrative thread, identify the metaphors or images used in the telling, tolerate ambiguity and uncertainty as the story unfold[s], identify the unspoken subtexts, and hear one story in the light of others” (2008, 4). Expanding on this idea, Claire Charlotte McKechnie notes that narrative medicine is wise to consider “narrativity” broadly, with particular attention on elements of non-verbal communication important to theatre/performance practitioners: non-verbal expression requires language and narrative ordering in the construction of expression and in the process of meaning-making. Each time we make an effort to produce an expression of suffering, we demand a cognitive engagement that requires the ordering [of ] information into narrative. We seek out communication; we desire the transmission of an idea. This is narrativity and it takes a myriad of forms. (123) If diagnosis teaches a physician anything, it is how much individual variance of expression exists within a standard set of symptoms. Diagnosis also illuminates the difficulty of communicating and deciphering the often incomplete and inconsistent experiences of those symptoms. Popular culture, by contrast, teaches very different lessons about scientific reasoning. The “people lie, evidence doesn’t” mottos of shows like House, M.D. and Crime Scene Investigation depict a world in which infallible experts use clinical precision, emotional detachment, and high-tech instruments to expose patients’ and suspects’ deceptions (whether intentional or not). Narrative medicine seeks to bridge this false divide between certainty and ambiguity, thus relieving the physician from God-like omniscience and authority and empowering the patient to assert their personal experiences as central pieces of evidence on par with the givens of a diagnostic chart. [End Page E-5] Jacqueline Lawton’s ARDEO is a short play rooted in these principles of narrative medicine. While it demonstrates elements of documentary theatre—dialogue built from interviews and historical and disciplinary research—it is a poetic rendering of the flow of action in which patients, caregivers, and healthcare providers move at the North Carolina Jaycee Burn Center. Actors embody the sights and sounds of the unit, as well as the individual patients, caregivers, and medical personnel. We look into individual faces as they tell of heartbreak, terror, and courage, and then they morph into a backdrop of activity that crackles with the pressure of medical assessment and treatment. Such a pressurized environment then shifts into the patients experiencing the slower, difficult pace of recovery, only to stir and drive forward again with conflict over new complications and new realities post-injury. Theatre, unlike other long-form narrative structures, allows Lawton to give...
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Dec 1, 2018
Petronela-Ramona Iacobuţe 
Open Access