“Doc-Aganda”: Medical Tv Shows & Medical Epistemic Authority

This research paper consists of a critical examination of the medical TV show in relation to medical epistemic and cultural authority. In weaving together the histories of the genre and modern medicine, it reveals the interconnected nature of medical TV shows and medicine in the real world. In this project, literary disability studies are combined with media and cultural disability studies, television studies, and the medical humanities in order to expose the ideological ways illness, disability, health and healthcare are portrayed by the modern medical TV show. By paying particular attention to the representation of disability and illness in medical TV shows, this study exposes how the shows reinforce and uphold medical epistemic authority, and by extension the medical model and ableism. Using specific tropes of representation and close reading as a methodology to examine episodes of ER and Grey’s Anatomy, this paper emphasizes the ways these shows devalue disabled embodiment and uphold mainstream liberal capitalistic values. These tropes include freakery and medical scientific progress; didacticism and the limits of the doctor centred formula; and disabled embodiment as untrustworthy/adversary to doctors.