Professionalism in Medicine Critical Perspectives [Paperback]

In this collection of essays, the authors dont argue with those attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism in medicine. Instead, they ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label professional or professionalism. This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the professions beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted (or not) in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse.

In this collection of essays, the authors dont argue with those attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism in medicine. Instead, they ask questions of the discourse from which they arise and question the professions beliefs about the nature of its work.

Professionalism in Medicine: Critical Perspectives casts a careful, and at times wary, eye on a dominant force in contemporary academic medicine that appears to have been accepted as an absolute good. Calls for developing, increasing, or maintaining professionalismnot to mention the current obsession with evaluating or assessing itappear with regularity in medical journals and conference programs of all stripes. The resultant literature has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes and behaviors subsumed under the label professional or ''professionalism (Wear & Kuczewski, 2004). Moreover, the fixation with assessment has become a new steering mechanism that is reductionistic when it shapes the total range of possible and thinkable dimensions of professionalism. The richness, complexity, and contradictions of professionalism in medicine are being flattened into categorical attitudes or behaviors that evaluators (whose professionalism is rarely assessed) can check.lsQ