Kelly Underman
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479897780
- eISBN:
- 9781479836338
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479897780.001.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Science, Technology and Environment
Gynecological teaching associates (GTAs) are trained laypeople who teach medical students the communication and technical skills of the pelvic examination while simultaneously serving as live models ...
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Gynecological teaching associates (GTAs) are trained laypeople who teach medical students the communication and technical skills of the pelvic examination while simultaneously serving as live models on whose bodies these same students practice. These programs are widespread in the United States and present a fascinating case for understanding contemporary emotional socialization in medical education. Feeling Medicine traces the origins of these programs in the Women’s Health Movement and in the nascent field of medical education research in the 1970s. It explores how these programs work at three major medical schools in Chicago using archival sources and interviews with GTAs, medical faculty, and medical students. This book argues that GTA programs embody the tension in medical education between the drive toward science and the ever-presence of emotion. It claims that new regimes of governance in medical education today rely on the modification of affect, or embodied capacities to feel and form attachments. Feeling Medicine thus explores what it means to make good physicians in an era of corporatized healthcare. In the process, it considers the role of simulation and the meaning of patient empowerment in the medical profession, as well as the practices that foster caring commitments between physicians and their patients—and those that are exploitable by for-profit healthcare.Less
Gynecological teaching associates (GTAs) are trained laypeople who teach medical students the communication and technical skills of the pelvic examination while simultaneously serving as live models on whose bodies these same students practice. These programs are widespread in the United States and present a fascinating case for understanding contemporary emotional socialization in medical education. Feeling Medicine traces the origins of these programs in the Women’s Health Movement and in the nascent field of medical education research in the 1970s. It explores how these programs work at three major medical schools in Chicago using archival sources and interviews with GTAs, medical faculty, and medical students. This book argues that GTA programs embody the tension in medical education between the drive toward science and the ever-presence of emotion. It claims that new regimes of governance in medical education today rely on the modification of affect, or embodied capacities to feel and form attachments. Feeling Medicine thus explores what it means to make good physicians in an era of corporatized healthcare. In the process, it considers the role of simulation and the meaning of patient empowerment in the medical profession, as well as the practices that foster caring commitments between physicians and their patients—and those that are exploitable by for-profit healthcare.
Kelly Underman
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479897780
- eISBN:
- 9781479836338
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479897780.003.0004
- Subject:
- Sociology, Science, Technology and Environment
In this chapter, the focus is on the intimate labor that GTAs do, which relies upon care and attentiveness to their bodies, their coworkers’ bodies, and the bodies and emotions of their students. ...
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In this chapter, the focus is on the intimate labor that GTAs do, which relies upon care and attentiveness to their bodies, their coworkers’ bodies, and the bodies and emotions of their students. They stand in for actual patients in this way, providing their bodies for medical students to practice on, even as they work as para-professionals in medical education by providing feedback and assessment. The contradictions inherent in their work is captured by an older term for their role: “patient instructor.” Their work relies on both the intimacy and vulnerability that comes with being a patient and the authority that being an instructor in a medical school entails.Less
In this chapter, the focus is on the intimate labor that GTAs do, which relies upon care and attentiveness to their bodies, their coworkers’ bodies, and the bodies and emotions of their students. They stand in for actual patients in this way, providing their bodies for medical students to practice on, even as they work as para-professionals in medical education by providing feedback and assessment. The contradictions inherent in their work is captured by an older term for their role: “patient instructor.” Their work relies on both the intimacy and vulnerability that comes with being a patient and the authority that being an instructor in a medical school entails.
Kelly Underman
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479897780
- eISBN:
- 9781479836338
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479897780.003.0005
- Subject:
- Sociology, Science, Technology and Environment
This chapter considers the GTA session serves as a first step in the emotional socialization of medical students. It explores the tensions between artificiality and authenticity in order to ...
More
This chapter considers the GTA session serves as a first step in the emotional socialization of medical students. It explores the tensions between artificiality and authenticity in order to understand how, through pedagogical work that involves simulation, medical students come to embody medical culture. Considering simulation in the context of other technologies of affect proliferating in contemporary medical education, the chapter argues that simulation produces medical subjects who learn to experience and manage emotion in ways that align with the dominant discourses in biomedicine.Less
This chapter considers the GTA session serves as a first step in the emotional socialization of medical students. It explores the tensions between artificiality and authenticity in order to understand how, through pedagogical work that involves simulation, medical students come to embody medical culture. Considering simulation in the context of other technologies of affect proliferating in contemporary medical education, the chapter argues that simulation produces medical subjects who learn to experience and manage emotion in ways that align with the dominant discourses in biomedicine.
Kelly Underman
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479897780
- eISBN:
- 9781479836338
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479897780.003.0001
- Subject:
- Sociology, Science, Technology and Environment
The pelvic exam is a fascinating case for understanding medical socialization today, as it involves a two-pronged navigation of feelings. It is about the emotions of physician and patient, but it is ...
More
The pelvic exam is a fascinating case for understanding medical socialization today, as it involves a two-pronged navigation of feelings. It is about the emotions of physician and patient, but it is also about the embodied experience of sensation for both. The GTA program today has been shaped as well by the legacy of feminist health activism and the science-driven reform efforts of medical educators. While it is surely an exceptional experience—one or several one-to-three-hour workshops during all of medical school—it is embedded in and demonstrative of larger trends in medical education and, indeed, the medical profession.Less
The pelvic exam is a fascinating case for understanding medical socialization today, as it involves a two-pronged navigation of feelings. It is about the emotions of physician and patient, but it is also about the embodied experience of sensation for both. The GTA program today has been shaped as well by the legacy of feminist health activism and the science-driven reform efforts of medical educators. While it is surely an exceptional experience—one or several one-to-three-hour workshops during all of medical school—it is embedded in and demonstrative of larger trends in medical education and, indeed, the medical profession.
Kelly Underman
- Published in print:
- 2020
- Published Online:
- January 2021
- ISBN:
- 9781479897780
- eISBN:
- 9781479836338
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- NYU Press
- DOI:
- 10.18574/nyu/9781479897780.003.0006
- Subject:
- Sociology, Science, Technology and Environment
Insofar as GTAs train medical students to become attuned to the sensations in their own bodies in order to examine the body of another, this process is particularly interesting in the context of ...
More
Insofar as GTAs train medical students to become attuned to the sensations in their own bodies in order to examine the body of another, this process is particularly interesting in the context of teaching and learning the pelvic exam. There, objects of the medical students’ attention—cervix, ovaries, and uterus—are enclosed on the inside of the whole, fleshy body of another person, and learning to discern organs, healthy or diseased, relies on learning to “read” one’s own bodily sensations appropriately. This creates novel tensions and troubles thinking of the body in terms of subjects and objects, insides and outsides, parts and wholes.Less
Insofar as GTAs train medical students to become attuned to the sensations in their own bodies in order to examine the body of another, this process is particularly interesting in the context of teaching and learning the pelvic exam. There, objects of the medical students’ attention—cervix, ovaries, and uterus—are enclosed on the inside of the whole, fleshy body of another person, and learning to discern organs, healthy or diseased, relies on learning to “read” one’s own bodily sensations appropriately. This creates novel tensions and troubles thinking of the body in terms of subjects and objects, insides and outsides, parts and wholes.
