Johanna Shapiro & Beverly Cho
The use of theater-based pedagogical strategies in medical education goes back at least four decades, with the introduction of simulated patients in the late 1960s (Barrows, 1968). Standardized patients, now in widespread use in medical student training, rely on detailed scripts performed by a trained actor who not only enacts the history of present illness and physical symptoms, but also portrays identifiable affective dimensions and communicative styles in an interaction with a real medical or other health professional student (Erby, Roter, & Biesecker, 2011).