Ethnography and the Making of Modern Health Professionals

Abstract

Charles Rosenberg’s call to arms for the training of health professionals as optimal medical citizens—concerned with politics, social justice and clinical judgment—recalls a long history of social science engagement with the socioeconomic and political sources and contexts of medical practice (Rosenberg 2007). Social scientists equipped with ethnographic and analytical insights have offered critiques from ‘‘the outside’’ for years, noting how biomedicine engages, knowingly or not, in iatrogenesis (Illich 1982), capitalist exploitation (Navarro 1976), domination (Freidson 1970)and reductionism (Gordon 1988), that it disregards the social conditions of knowledge production (Young 1982) and that it turns life cycle processes and behaviors into objects requiring medical intervention (Conrad 1992; Zola 1972) for example. The examination of medicine as a social and cultural system that reproduces problems of social inequality or injustice, rather than eradicating them, never seems to slow. The route by which this reproduction occurs,