Characters, scenes and the patient’s own voice
Characters, sensory scenes and patients’ accounts can draw lay readers into medical topics by making the people and experiences behind the information tangible.
Characters and selected detail
Medical journalists need both scientific understanding and storytelling techniques that engage readers who may think a subject too complex for them. Stories of real people affected by the science can reach readers who have no personal stake in the topic.
A 2014 report about live liver-donor surgery introduced Paul and Lorraine Hawks before explaining the risks behind his death. Selected details established a devout couple who prayed together, shared household chores and still had plans after 35 years of marriage: a new home in Tampa, a small Christian ministry and a trip to North Carolina’s Black Mountains. These details gave readers a reason to care about the couple and continue reading even without an existing interest in liver donation.
The choices resemble those in short fiction: when to reveal each fact, which details portray a character accurately, which words recreate the person’s voice and how to make a microbe, tissue or number imaginable. Sympathetic characters and accessible images can signal that a medical subject is understandable.
Sensory scenes
A scene needs sensory images that give it dimension rather than merely summarising the action. In the Hawks report, a nurse led the family to a remote conference room, Lorraine began to weep while hearing the nurse’s heels click on the tile, and doctors and nurses in fresh white coats filled the room. The sound and visual details made the scene memorable.
Personal experience in the patient’s voice
A patient’s account should offer enough personal experience for readers to empathise and possibly learn memorably, rather than contribute only a one-off quotation or superficial endorsement. This technique can suit patient-education brochures, pamphlets, web content and other media unconstrained by regulatory or technical writing rules.
In a small 2013 health-fair survey, 45 participants answered questions after reading a true patient account and a fact sheet. They scored higher on questions about what the couple in the story said and did than on questions about the bulleted facts. The story described an older man who delayed telling anyone about a rapid heartbeat, his wife’s eventual emergency call, his diagnosis and treatment for atrial fibrillation, and the couple’s advice about noticing each other’s health problems and attending appointments together.
Personal accounts can also carry a message through their emotional effect. During a cancer-screening marketing project in an underserved minority community, an African-American woman tearfully recalled a neighbour who concealed a breast lump for years and died with advanced cancer, then described her resolve to encourage mammography. The writer remembered the feeling the account produced even after forgetting the woman’s name.
By 2016, institutions including Mayo Clinic and Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia were publishing patient stories on their websites.
Scenes, dialogue, detail and voice
Tom Wolfe identified four techniques used by New Journalism to bring the realist novel’s emotional involvement into nonfiction:
- Tell the story through a sequence of scenes so that readers move forward with the characters.
- Use dialogue so that readers hear the characters speak.
- Give specific character details that stimulate images in the reader’s mind.
- Tell the story through the voice of one or more characters.
These techniques can engage emotion by letting readers feel inside the characters’ heads. A theme or meaning helps readers internalise a story’s message, and a character can find meaning while coming to grips with a problem. For example, a cancer story’s meaning may lie in coming to terms emotionally with the disease rather than fighting it.