I’m thrilled to announce that my paper, “Surgical Identity Play: The Anatomy Lab Revisited,” has been published in @SIJournal! Let me tell you why—a thread. 1/12

cc: @umichDLHS @soc_hpe #mededtwitter #meded #soctwitter https://twitter.com/SIJournal/status/1199250429865058304

Before we start: a content warning. This article contains frank descriptions of dissection technique as well as evocative quotations from medical students about the bodies themselves and the experience of dissection. 2/12

The anatomy lab is one of the most salient rites of passage for new medical students. Sociologists have studied the lab experience for about 70 years and have mostly been interested in understanding the professional purposes of the anatomy lab experience. 3/12

Past work falls into 2 main groups: examining the emotional impact of the experience on trainees & analyzing how the anatomy experience can make trainees feel more a part of the profession b/c they feel like a doctor (especially vis-à-vis the the cadaver-patient). 4/12

So, why did I go back to the lab? And what did I find while I was there? 5/12

Although medical training has been studied consistently since the 1950s, there hadn’t been a comprehensive ethnography of med school conducted in the US in a while. My diss was a response to the need to update our understanding of medical training. 6/12

I went back to the lab so I could update our understanding of the experience. I found some dissimilarities: students didn’t seem preoccupied with their emotional experience beyond the first few sessions & the nostalgia for the cadaver as “first patient” wasn’t there. 7/12

A concurrent development in medical training over the past 40 years or so has been the addition of other types of patients to the preclinical curriculum: mainly standardized patients & patients who join lectures to demonstrate their conditions & describe their experiences. 8/12

In the paper I argue that the gradual addition of these other patient types, as well as the emphasis on early clinical experiences for trainees, has displaced the primacy of the anatomy lab experience as the place where med students learn to be doctors vis-à-vis patients. 9/12

But this raises another question: we know they’re learning anatomy, but what’s the role of the anatomy experience NOW for their professional socialization? It turns out, they’re not doing “identity work,” but rather engaging in “identity play” (Ibarra & Petriglieri 2010). 10/12

Drawing on work from anthropology and STS/lab ethnography, I characterize this identity play: The lab is a space where students can experiment with surgeon identity--students are permitted to use certain artifacts and language only in the lab. These support "surgical play" 11/12

Read the paper for discussions of “performative architectures,” the sociology of fun, classic anthro concepts like liminal spaces and rites of passage, analyses of material culture, & sociological analyses of surgery—all informed by a Symbolic Interactionist perspective. 12/12