Bedside Manner

Yet despite the obvious layers of artifice, there is something insistent and revealing in these
scenes…Botz is attuned to this complex give and take—to the ways in which simulated feelings
can mirror and expose the real.
- The New Yorker

Photography may excel as an accurate mechanism for scientific inquiry, but, in the case of Bedside Manner, it proves to be just as effective at exploring ambiguities…What does this say about our reaction to images of real anguish, so abundant in mass media and yet so rarely successful as catalysts for action? Like many photos of people in distress, it’s hard to look at these images, and hard to look away.
-Jordan G. Teicher, Photograph Magazine

While on their surface they show mimicry of illness, the Bedside Manner images are also studies in empathy…The viewer’s empathy is also tested, as we consider whether the pain in these faces is real, and how we measure the authenticity of suffering.
- Allison Meier, Hyperallergic

Bedside Manner is a series of photographs and an 18-minute video that explores the little-known world of standardized patient simulations. Standardized patients (SPs) are professional medical actors who are trained to present particular sets of symptoms in order to help medical students improve their diagnostic skills and bedside manner. Routinely, SP encounters are filmed and evaluated by medical professors who observe the interaction of student and medical actor through a one-way mirror. 

The history of Western medicine is connected to issues of spectatorship, display, and pathology. I’m interested in how visual imagery has been used historically to represent the body and construct medical interactions. For instance, the famous nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot presented hysterical female patients in an amphitheater and routinely photographed them acting according to enforced expectations, negatively linking women and pathology. My work examines the burden of medical history and the clinical gaze. 

Empathic experience can connect, or it can replace the other’s pain with the projection of the observer. To be a “patient” is to be observed, reliant on a doctor’s interpretation and understanding of one’s body. My photographs document SPs and highlight the craft of the staged tableaux: the work gains its power by straddling the line between fact and fiction. Even though the standardized patient may be performing, this doesn’t mean the encounter isn’t “real”; acting and staged representations inform the interaction between patients and doctors in important ways. In order to express their suffering, real patients must learn how to act in doctors’ offices. Through simulated pain, we start to become aware of our empathic processes and the ethics of seeing. Bedside Manner prompts larger questions about authenticity, representation and perception.