Dr. Todd Savitt makes a point during an audience discussion of " A Question of Mercy."

The Readers' Theater program at The Brody School of Medicine at East Carolina University is an extracurricular activity sponsored by the Department of Medical Humanities. Medical students audition each semester to join the cast and read the part of a character in a medically-related short story that has been scripted by our adapter. Students perform these stories in traditional readers' theater style, seated or occasionally standing, at the front of a room, reading aloud from a script (no memorization needed), and using their voices and facial expressions to enhance the words.

What makes the program so meaningful and attractive to students is the audience before whom they are performing. We take our stories outside the medical center and into the communities where these future physicians can meet and talk with their future patients. Following an approximately 30-minute performance at a site, usually in a library or other public building, a member of the Medical Humanities Department leads a discussion of the story between the cast and the audience. The two groups thus get to hear each others' concerns and points of view on issues raised in the story. It is these discussions and not the performances themselves that form the heart of the readers' theater program. The discussions provide a means for students to meet the general public and learn about ideas and attitudes laypeople have about the medical profession and about current health care issues.

We have performed a variety of stories, one each semester, since 1988. Arthur Conan Doyle's "Doctors of Hoyland" confronts the issue of women as physicians in a humorous but telling way. Richard Selzer's "Follow Your Heart" allows people to express their concerns about organ transplantation. Two William Carlos Williams stories, "A Face of Stone" and "The Girl With a Pimply Face," address aspects of the physician/patient relationship, while his "Old Doc Rivers" deals with the subject of impaired physicians. "The Enemy" by Pearl Buck focuses on the conflict between a Japanese physician's duty to treat and his bias against certain kinds of patients (in this case, white Americans). Katherine Ann Porter's "He" raises the question of how a family and its physician should deal with a chronically ill patient.

Students involved in the ECU program receive no course or other educational credit for their efforts. They devote only a few hours each semester to practicing their lines at home, attending one rehearsal, traveling to the communities for performances, and actually performing and discussing the stories. Each student usually performs two or three times a semester. We present a total of five to seven performances with casts of from four to eight students each year.

Responses from community audiences have been uniformly positive. People enjoy meeting the "young doctors" and talking about medicine with them. They view ECU's School of Medicine, a relatively new institution for which residents of the region fought hard, as their school, and appreciate the efforts students make during the discussion and after the performance to answer their questions and express views clearly and fairly. The program has provided the medical school with good PR and the students with unique insights into their future patients.

Todd L. Savitt, Ph.D., has coordinated the Readers' Theater Program at ECU since its inception and will gladly discuss the project with all who are interested. He may be reached by phone at 252-744-2797, e-mail address savittT@ecu.edu.