Articulating the canon: The sociology of medical education from 1980 to 2000

Abstract

An exciting development in the sociology of medical education has been its recent return as a distinct scholarly conversation in medical sociology. During the 1980s and 1990s, the sociology of medical education, an historically prominent subfield in sociology, seemed to disappear from the scholarly conversation despite ongoing development in this area. In this narrative review I describe this “missing period” of sociology of medical education, discussing complementary explanations for why it receded and describing what research activity did take place during those decades. In reviewing this work, I argue that articulating theoretical advances made within sociology of medical education research during these decades allows us to link foundational research from the 1950s and 1960s with the renaissance of this subfield in the early 2000s. Fundamentally, understanding the intellectual history and development of this subfield supports a broader movement to understand the import of studies of medical training for exploring questions of interest in general sociology.

Intraprofessionalism and Peer-to-Peer Learning in American Medical Education

“…Sociological research has long indicated that medical students undergo a “hidden curriculum” in medical education (Hafferty, 1998) in which the behaviors, values, and perspectives of physicians are implicitly developed through the content of particular courses and the overall design of the curriculum (see, for example, Hafferty, 1991, Segal, 1984, 1988, Sointu, 2016, Jaye et al, 2010, Johnson, 2007; Poirier, 2009). The hidden curriculum imparts upon medical students the ability to carefully manage emotional responses (Underman 2015, 2020; Underman & Hirshfield, 2016; Vinson & Underman, 2020), to respond to patients from socially and culturally diverse backgrounds (Olsen, 2016, 2021; Taylor, 2003a, 2003b), and to understand the extent of their own professional authority (Vinson, 2021). Medical school is also an important site where physicians-in-training implicitly and explicitly learn how to confront the uncertainty and impossibility of absolute knowledge in eventual biomedical practice (Fox 1980; Knopes, 2019a, 2020, 2021).…”