The Inner Life of Medicine: A Commentary on Anthropologies of Clinical Training in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

As I read through the essays for this provocative and resonant collection, I found myself entering an imaginative dialogue with each contributor. These scholar/ clinicians/social scientists/anthropologists of contemporary biomedicine mark a new generation of research and scholarly analysis on how medicine constructs its subjects as well as its objects (Good 1994), and how temporalities, narratives, places, spaces, and technologies create particular modes of clinical subjectivity as well as pathways to wisdom and good, challenges to being just, and dilemmas with being medical professionals in the contemporary world. The subjectivity and quests of the authors, not only of their research subjects, are interpreted, too, in many of these essays, conveying insight and immediacy—and encouraging self-reflection. It brings me to my new project on ‘‘the inner life of medicine’’ (an old title of a formerly unfinished collection of essays). The essays in this collection are good to think with as they vividly bring us into that ‘‘inner life of medicine’’ conveyed through its many facets. My dialogue with these essays begins with the editors’ question: what kinds of people are formed through contemporary processes of clinical training, and how do these evolving subjects transform health, power, and other aspects of social life? This question resonates with questions raised by my own scholarly work (and perhaps subjectivity), which emerged out of an unexpected and very long journey into many diverse worlds of medicine, psychiatry, international health and global health. I began academic life as a comparative political sociologist, with no interest in medicine, but rather with an interest in the role of the state in everyday life and in political subjectivity of citizens. I began my research in Turkey, where I spent 2 years as a Peace Corps volunteer working in orphanages; but due to the 1971 coup, I shifted my dissertation research to pre-Revolutionary Iran in Azerbaijan