Mary-Jo DelVecchio Good
- Published in print:
- 1995
- Published Online:
- May 2012
- ISBN:
- 9780520088962
- eISBN:
- 9780520922037
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520088962.003.0002
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Medical Anthropology
This chapter presents a picture of the ferment over medical liability and malpractice that colored the period throughout the ethnographic studies. The ways individual physicians and medical ...
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This chapter presents a picture of the ferment over medical liability and malpractice that colored the period throughout the ethnographic studies. The ways individual physicians and medical collectivities responded to the malpractice crises illustrate a diversity of professional voices and repertoires of discourse on competence. The multiple voices of the profession present in the malpractice debates suggest three primary repertoires in which physicians speak and write about competence: an intra-professional repertoire primarily internal to and intended only for members of the profession; an extra-professional repertoire consciously designed to represent professional interests and to mediate between medicine and the public; and a reflective repertoire, providing individual physicians with acceptable cultural genres through which to explore experiences of competence and incompetence.Less
This chapter presents a picture of the ferment over medical liability and malpractice that colored the period throughout the ethnographic studies. The ways individual physicians and medical collectivities responded to the malpractice crises illustrate a diversity of professional voices and repertoires of discourse on competence. The multiple voices of the profession present in the malpractice debates suggest three primary repertoires in which physicians speak and write about competence: an intra-professional repertoire primarily internal to and intended only for members of the profession; an extra-professional repertoire consciously designed to represent professional interests and to mediate between medicine and the public; and a reflective repertoire, providing individual physicians with acceptable cultural genres through which to explore experiences of competence and incompetence.
