Professionalism in Medicine: Critical Perspectives

The topic of professionalism in medicine has dominated the content of major academic medicine publications during the past decade and continues to do so. In this collection of essays, the authors don't argue with those attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism. 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 profession's 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 addition, the authors scrutinize how the discourse is enacted in both the formal and hidden curriculum, and in the larger medical environment.