Preliminary investigation identifies strategies for popularizing medical knowledge in Chinese yiliaoju, highlighting educational potential.
Chinese medical television series ( yiliaoju 医疗剧) operate as hybrid cultural artifacts that blend entertainment with informal health education and convey social and moral values. These productions shape public perceptions of healthcare, trust in medical institutions, and doctor–patient relationships, while simultaneously serving as vehicles for the dissemination of specialized medical language. This study offers a preliminary investigation of the strategies employed by Chinese yiliaoju to popularize medical knowledge and terminology, focusing on the 2024 series Live Surgery Room ( Shoushu zhibo jian 手术直播间). Using a qualitative approach, the analysis draws on a corpus comprising 130 minutes of drama to explore how verbal and visual resources support comprehension of clinical concepts and practices. Within the framework of written popularization discourse, eight strategies are identified and organized into four overarching categories: concept identification, linguistic re-elaboration, relational mapping, and contextualization. When assessed against these criteria, the preliminary results demonstrate that the series operates through the integrated use of verbal explanations, subtitles, visual didacticism, and immersive simulations to make complex medical phenomena accessible to non-specialist audiences, underscoring the potential of yiliaoju to mediate and disseminate specialized medical knowledge.
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Riva et al. (2025) studied this question.
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