Wounded Healing with Provisos: Doctors’ Illness Experiences as Ambiguous Assets in Medical Communication

• In Event: 029 - Regular Session. Sociology of Knowledge

Abstract

Illness experience is commonly perceived in negative terms: as both disruptive and stigmatizing. Past research on “wounded healers” has argued for a more positive view of illness experience. By digging into historical and anthropological archives, researchers have shown that doctors may use their illness experience as an asset for medical practice. Despite its innovative view on illness experience, past research on wounded healers has been mainly geared towards anecdotal description or theoretical construction (Zerubavel and O’Dougherty Wright 2012). Less has been done on how doctors who identify as “wounded healers” make use of their illness experiences in concrete medical situations. In order to fill in this gap in the literature on wounded healers in particular and medical sociology in general, I analyze interview data gathered from 14 Taiwanese folk healers. My findings both confirm and complicate our understanding of wounded healing. Confirming the literature, doctors may indeed use the narration of their illness experience to produce rapport with her patient. In particular, doctors may show that they know what their patients are going through, as well as legitimate the prescribed treatment method. At the same time, the doctor's narration of her illness experience may produce ambiguous communicative results. The ambiguity stems from the doctor's slippage from analogizing her illness experience to her patient's illness experience, to arguing for the identity of her and her patient's illness experiences.

Author

• Hwa-Yen Huang, Rutgers University