Illness Narratives: Dramatic Writing as a Bridge to Empathy

Harvard HMS

Empathy cannot be taught in academic terms. It is experiential. Dramatic narratives, ie: plays, screenplays, and teleplays, give us vicarious access to the experience of 'the other', including the ill. The experience of illness varies from person to person depending on a constellation of socio-economic, racial and ethnic, psychological, and political factors. Artistic narratives help elucidate this context in a way that goes beyond simple statistics.In this course we will read several such…