Set #2: Mediating

As I was going through this week's reading, a thought kept popping up, "What is it that makes America so obsessed with TV shows chronicling doctors' lives?" I included images from four such television shows that I thought of in five minutes, all revolving around medical doctors and their personal lives. Why are these shows so popular? Why aren’t there more shows about the personal lives of scientists, dentists, or even nurses? I feel that this manifested fantasy of the American doctor is a result of how the common person views and interacts with doctors in their lives and also how doctors themselves are generated.
Byron J. Good and Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good’s piece “Learning Medicine: The Construction of Medical Knowledge at Harvard Medical School” offers personal insight into the medical school institution through student interviews and direct observation. Access that is not generally granted to any other group outside of the medical realm, an act of exclusion that already establishes biomedicine as something guarded and private. “Lay man/men” as I’ll refer to anyone not in the medical field are firstly shut off from this realm by its creation of a new language, the language of science. Good and Good detail that three key points of medical education

1. “Science is the point of entry into medicine” (89)
2. “Medical education begins by entry into the body” (90)
3. “Medicine is learned from the perspective of individual cases

The science learned at the level of medical school is not like any type of science anyone even majoring in Biology or Chemistry can attempt. This feature selectively puts medical students into binary opposition with their lay men in terms of knowledge, creating the “knowing” and “un-knowing”. I felt that this entrance into an entirely newly world was also being further perpetuated in the example Good and Good bring up during one student’s interview. The student describes a potential applicant’s visit into their anatomy lab and saw her as “an intruder” (95) in their space. That this lay man, without the proper knowledge was granted access is seen as a violation of some unwritten code. But who writes this code? The workings of medical school ultimately seem aimed at disconnecting doctors more and more from their patients and their own bodies and body experiences as supported by one student’s changed views “I don’t feel like another person’s body is so foreign to me now…You just do the routine” (101).

An overarching theme I found in the readings was the debate of competency and caring. Medical schools, currently, are structured primarily around competency. What is expected of medical students, information wise, is what is most important and the caring aspect is seen as humanly innate. The caring aspect may be what draws students in but competency will ensure their survival. This competency-focused system has in turn created doctors who are generally impersonal workers. Maximizing efficiency and quickly diagnosing patients, leaves these patients feeling misunderstood about their body experiences and unheard. Doctors are then viewed as “doctor machines” (an interesting point to note as doctors also see patients’ as machines) that examine you for five minutes, ask a few questions, and leave in a hurry. In dealing with such an intimate topic that is one’s body and illness, such as cold experience is stunning. Most doctors are competent and sometimes caring. From this one-sided conversation patients have with their doctor stems the obsession with their inner workings. All four TV shows mentioned don’t focus on the technical side of doctors, they all show doctors in a human and very personal way. Story lines involve love triangles, break-ups, make-ups, and most often the struggle these doctors have in balancing their personal and professional lives. In an attempt to relate more to those who watch over our bodies, we seek ways to make them seem “more like us”, complicated and emotional. Below I have included a clip of a sketch comedy poking fun at all of these doctor television shows and I think it highlights the main themes seen in all four series. These television shows downplay competency and highlight the caring side of doctors.



In contrasting Good and Good’s real life observations and the television representations, which one is ultimately better? I don’t think that either are and Harvard Medical School seems to be moving away from such a stringent education system towards one that aims more at nurturing a doctors caring skills. Its hard to say if this is an earnest effort or one made only half heartedly but I don’t think it is right to judge the system currently as wrong. The medical school institution is still young, relatively, and has much room to grow.