Representing illness in medical melodramas on television: a qualitative content analysis of medical diagnoses in Grey’s Anatomy

Abstract

This case study explored the representation of medical illness diagnoses on Grey’s Anatomy. Through the use of qualitative content analysis, we compared fictional medical diagnoses to publically available data on the rates of medical diagnoses within contemporary U.S. hospitals. We found that nearly half of the diagnoses made within our sample would be considered either rare, very rare, or extremely rare. Moreover, the most common medical diagnoses in contemporary U.S. hospitals account for a mere 6% of all diagnoses made on Grey’s. These findings extend and support prior observations that medical melodramas misrepresent the hospital context. Fictional portrayals of health care have the capacity to impact viewer expectations about real hospital care, and thus, our study adds to conversations involving the intersections between media representations and public health culture.

Keywords:

• Grey’s Anatomy
• health communication
• medical diagnoses
• qualitative content analysis
• television representation

Acknowledgments

The authors would like to thank Dr Jay Paul and Dr David Salomon for their tireless support of undergraduate research within the honors program at Christopher Newport University. We would also like to thank Dr. Laurena Bernabo and our anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful commentary on our work.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.