What Can Be More Logical Than To Consult With Specialists? The Development of Contemporary Medical Education

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

Abstract

Medical education has changed dramatically in the past thirty years. The medical profession’s orientation toward scientific ways of knowing and ever more advanced technological innovations can also be found in the educational institutions that train future physicians. Most notably, today’s medical education is guided by a loosely formed discipline dedicated to researching the best practices by which to train future physicians. In this paper, I argue that contemporary medical education is 1) a distinct academic discipline that is characterized by its own methods, theories, and avenues for funding and dissemination of findings, which 2) reflects two distinct regimes of affect, or machineries of knowledge production as they pertain to embodied experiences of emotion. In order to make this argument, I provide a brief history of the development of medical education as a discipline. It is a field oriented primarily to objective, scientific knowledge production. And yet, because the work of physicians deals intimately with human suffering and death, medical education as a discipline must also be adaptive to the social and, more specifically, emotion. In this way, contemporary medical education represents a new way in which the dominance of the medical profession is extended over today’s consumer-oriented patients.

Author

• Kelly Underman, Drexel University