The Subject of Knowledge

Abstract

The doctor’s identity as psychological being and physical body began to be consolidated in the closing decades of the twentieth century. In parallel, the great unified eye of medicine began to fracture into a multi-faceted gaze, each component underpinned by a personalities and idiosyncrasies that belied the formal professional status to which doctors had traditionally laid claim. This meant that the vulnerable mind and susceptible body of the individual doctors could be exposed to the view of everyone. It also meant that the transformative process whereby the student was made into a professional could be made transparent, no longer shrouded in initiation mysteries. From The student physician of 1957 that stressed how professional status was achieved (Merton et al. 1957), through Boys in white of 1961 that emphasized the survival value of student culture (Becker et al. 1961), to The Clinical Experience of 1981 that addressed the transfer of the cognitive framework that underpinned medical observation (Atkinson 1981), the secrets of the great eye were laid bare. With that revelation, visibility was effectively reversed. For nearly two centuries, the eye of medicine had surveyed and fashioned the patient; now the naked form of the doctor was revealed to a penetrating gaze. The subject of knowledge had become the object of knowledge.