Medical Work: Accommodating a Body of Knowledge to Practice

Abstract

Abstract It is the purpose of this paper to examine the relationship between the production of new scientific knowledge and the application of that knowledge to medical practice. The paper focuses, first, on the growth of the scientific enterprise and argues that the expanding medical division of labor is the profession's accommodation to the increased size of its body of knowledge. The paper goes on to discuss the emergent role of a new category of workers in that division of labor, clinical researchers. The second major focus of the paper concerns the relationship among medical specialists, who must allocate the new scientific discoveries among themselves. The final portion of the paper identifies the components of the process which accomplishes the task of distributing medical work among the specialty communities. The issue of primary concern to this discussion, which appears only as an underlying theme until the concluding section, is the effect of this allocation process on the structure of the medical profession and the type of medical care it delivers.