Triage the Knowledge: Ignorance and Sufficient Understanding at an American Medical School

• In Event: 3276 - Medical Education: History, Status, and Reform

Abstract

Though early sociology of (bio)medical education recognized the place of “uncertainty” in training and practice, current sociological and anthropological research has not widely investigated the place of non-knowledge in contemporary biomedicine. This paper seeks to expand the discussion of ignorance in biomedicine, with an emphasis on medical education, and to build upon an emergent academic literature in agnotology: the study of ignorance and non-knowledge. Drawing on ongoing ethnographic fieldwork initiated in March 2017 at an allopathic medical school in the American Midwest, this study asserts that medical students seek to prioritize and frame knowledge as adequate, while consciously ignoring forms of information that are deemed unnecessary, clinically irrelevant, and scientifically granular. This epistemological process, and its product, is what the author deems “sufficient knowledge.” The paper will utilize ethnographic accounts to illustrate how medical students in a student-led learning environment make their own decisions about the utility of knowledge as “sufficient.” The paper will then address the implications of “sufficient knowledge” for future research in the social science of biomedicine, agnotology, and ethics.

Author

• Julia Knopes, Case Western Reserve University