The Medical Educator and the Clinical Teacher

Abstract

Howard Becker and colleagues’ 1961 study of medical students—Boys in White (Becker et al. 1980)—offers a classic ethnography within a tradition that bridges sociology and anthropology. Medical students are studied as entering a cohesive structure through traditional rites of passage, just as an anthropologist might study a group of young persons in Australian Aboriginal culture going through a series of male or female puberty rites. Such rites confer an identity. The identity is, again, not given (being) but achieved (becoming)—identity is an objective rather than something that is predefined; it is invented rather than discovered. In our Western, modernist tradition that stresses individualism, ‘identity’ is usually thought of as a blueprint for an individual’s personality. For an Australian Aboriginal, to gain an identity is to identify with an external feature as a guiding force, such as an animal, a feature of the landscape or an ancestor. Certainly identity begins in a historical association with a tribal stream, a procession. Medicine, of course, is a processional as well as a professional vocation—a medical student steps into an historical stream and identity formation is partly the resultant stain of that history. But the stream flows forward to a future and identity is also the process of passage towards a horizon partly unknown.