Physicians of Western Medicine

After putting down this weighty (in all senses of the word) collection, the reader, be she or he physician or social scientist, will (or at least should) feel uncomfortable about her or his taken-for-granted commonsense (therefore cultural) understanding of medicine. The editors and their collaborators show the medical leviathan, warts and all, for what it is: changing, pluralistic, problematic, powerful, provocative. What medicine proclaims itself to be - unified, scientific, biological and not social, non-judgmental - it is shown not to resemble very much. Those matters about which medicine keeps fairly silent, it turns out, come closer to being central to its clinical practice - managing errors and learning to conduct a shared moral dis course about mistakes, handling issues of competence and competition among biomedical practitioners, practicing in value-laden contexts on problems for which social science is a more relevant knowledge base than biological science, integrating folk and scientific models of illness in clinical communication, among a large number of highly pertinent ethnographic insights that illuminate medicine in the chapters that follow.

Section I: Introductions.- 1. Among the Physicians: Encounter, Exchange and Transformation.- 2. Including the Physician in Healer-Centered Research: Retrospect and Prospect.- Section II: Core Medicine.- 3. A World of Internal Medicine: Portrait of an Internist.- Section III: Medical Specialties.- 4. Models and Practice in Medicine: Menopause as Syndrome or Life Transition?.- 5. Mary; Patient as Emergent Symbol on a Pediatrics Ward: The Objectification of Meaning in Social Process.- 6. How Surgeons Make Decisions.- 7. Gentle Interrogation: Inquiry and Interaction in Brief Initial Psychiatric Evaluations.- 8. Reflexivity, Countertransference and Clinical Ethnography: A Case From a Psychiatric Cultural Consultation Clinic.- 9. The Once- and the Twice-Born: Self and Practice Among Psychiatrists and Christian Psychiatrists.- Section IV: Interrelations of Medical Specialties.- 10. Discourses on Physician Competence.- 11. Consultation-Liaison Psychiatry: Medicine as Patient, Marginality as Practice.- 12. Disease and Pseudo-Disease: A Case History of Pseudo-Angina.- List of Contributors.- Author Index.