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This chapter argues that the authorities of Irish medical schools and hospitals possessed a distinctive attitude towards their women medical students, with women and men being educated together for all subjects, with the exception of anatomy. Women students were nonetheless often identified as a cohort separate from the men, as is particularly evident in the student magazines, where they were figures of fun. In order to reconcile this sense of ‘separateness’, Irish women medical students established their own unique identity through their social activities and living arrangements. The chapter also examines how Irish hospitals displayed a largely positive and welcoming attitude towards women medical students, in contrast to hospitals in London, where women were debarred from admission for the most part.

Chapter 21 discusses the most challenging and rewarding elements in adapting to the demands of becoming a physician and explores the issues that can stress medical students, including physical challenges, long work hours, emotional regulation, and pressures to succeed professionally. The author focuses on the life lessons that she gleaned from her experiences as a medical student, including the need to have balance in life and to have appreciation for home life. She notes that patient experiences and the stories they share have touched and shaped her as a physician, and she urges other medical students to appreciate these as a vital informal learning process.

This chapter examines medical student activism during the civil rights and War on Poverty era, the momentum it sustained for a short time, and the reasons for its sudden implosion and dissipation. This chapter examines specific internal currents within academic medical centers themselves: debates over the narrowness of the curriculum; a growing sense of obligation to surrounding environs (especially campuses located in urban ghettoes); the entry of women, Jews, and non-whites into student bodies; and incipient recognition of bodily integrity, particularly of research subjects and patients used in teaching. The confluence of these trends and debates, together with the political moment, produced the new socially conscious medical student and the organizations through which they agitated. Within, a number of unforeseen conflicts emerged, and what were once unifying principles became sources of fracture, sending these students off on distinct trajectories after they graduated.

Chapter 2 suggests that the King and Queen's College of Physicians in Ireland decided to admit women for a combination of reasons. It is likely that the KQCPI viewed the admission of women from a financial point of view, in terms of gaining income from their student fees. However, also important is the context of Dublin society in the late nineteenth century, which was open-minded to the issue of women's higher education, as demonstrated by women's admission to the Museum of Irish Industry and the Royal College of Science from the 1850s and 1860s. This chapter highlights the distinctiveness of Irish medical education and the Irish context in a period when attitudes towards women in Britain were often hostile and attempts made by women to gain admission to university to study medicine were frequently hindered.

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.

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.

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.