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As previous research has observed, medical students and physicians alike confront vast amounts of knowledge in their education and practice, such that no one clinician can know everything there is to know about biomedicine. Even before clerkships, medical students learn to cope with this impossibility by prioritizing certain information based on its perceived utility for exams and clinical practice. Many factors can shape this process, including teamwork, wherein individual medical students rely on one another to address gaps in knowledge at the level of the group. This paper will draw on qualitative data from two allopathic medical schools in the American Midwest to demonstrate that peer-to-peer learning, a widely utilized pedagogical modality in North American medical schools, is amongst the earliest places where future physicians learn how to rely on their peers in the profession as they make choices about what to know and what not to know about biomedicine: cultivating a culture of "intraprofessionalism" between students with different knowledges and values, as they prepare to enter the same profession. The paper will also consider how differences in the student populations at two field sites impact intraprofessional development. Drawing on scholarship of peer-based learning strategies and the sociology and anthropology of medical education, the authors argue that peer-to-peer learning is a key site in the professional socialization of medical students toward the effective management of medical knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Even though much research underscores the significance of social inequalities in illness, the health consequences of inequity tend to occupy a marginal position in medical education. Drawing on qualitative interviews with third and fourth year medical students, this paper explores how future doctors understand and would improve health in the United States. While participants with background in public health and policy understand that social inequalities shape health and access to care, many others emphasize individual behaviour and motivation as central to ill health. Emphasizing health behaviour aligns with biomedical understandings of disease, and also captures the hold of neoliberal values over ideas of health and illness. Focus on health behaviour also provides a means of ignoring the racist roots of enduring inequity that underlies much ill health. Making inequity more visible in medical education and practice necessitates recognizing the sway of neoliberal thought over common-sense ideas of health and illness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces the idea of enculturation to sociology as a compliment to socialisation in the context of Bourdieu’s ‘collective enterprise of inculcation’ and social theory. Enculturation is positioned as a concept that can be used to address formal education as a factor in social reproduction. Following a discussion of socialisation and enculturation and their interrelation, they are further examined in the context of medical education. In particular, I focus on the moral and ethical aspects of medical education and the social or professional reproduction of medical students. I differentiate between ‘medical morality’ or ‘ethos’ and ‘medical ethics’ or ‘eidos’, arguing that the reproduction of the former is predominantly a matter of socialisation whilst the reproduction of the latter is a primarily a function of enculturation. Nevertheless I make clear that any eidos is not independent of the ethos in which is exists and that, therefore, any medical ethics is dependent on the socio-cultural institution of medicine and its moral ethos. Utilising the concepts of eidos and enculturation in Bourdieuan social theory facilitates a focus on the neglected cognitive aspects of social life, including explicitly pedagogic activities, and provides for a degree of indeterminacy or ‘freedom’ in a theoretical perspective that has been criticised for its deterministic implications. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The introduction to this special issue of the Journal expands the scope of research on "the sociology of medical education" to include studies of the institutions in which physicians are trained as well as studies of the socialization of the physician throughout the life cycle. Research since the 1960s is reviewed briefly and the papers in this issue are discussed. Studies of the macropolitics and micropolitics of academic medicine are called for as well as comparative analyses of the settings in which physicians are trained and research on the relative effects on physicians' attitudes and behavior of different sets of experiences, professional and nonprofessional, over the course of their life cycle-all in the context of massive changes in the organization of health care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]