The inner life of medicine: a commentary on anthropologies of clinical training in the twenty-first century.

摘要

As I read through the essays for this provocative and resonant collection, I found myself entering an imaginative dialogue with each contributor. These scholar/ clinicians/social scientists/anthropologists of contemporary biomedicine mark a new generation of research and scholarly analysis on how medicine constructs its subjects as well as its objects (Good 1994), and how temporalities, narratives, places, spaces, and technologies create particular modes of clinical subjectivity as well as pathways to wisdom and good, challenges to being just, and dilemmas with being medical professionals in the contemporary world. The subjectivity and quests of the authors, not only of their research subjects, are interpreted, too, in many of these essays, conveying insight and immediacy-and encouraging self-reflection. It brings me to my new project on "the inner life of medicine" (an old title of a formerly unfinished collection of essays). The essays in this collection are good to think with as they vividly bring us into that "inner life of medicine" conveyed through its many facets.