Book chapter
Beyond the Doctor's White Coat: Science, Ritual, and Healing in American Biomedicine
Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology, pp 204-212
2016
Abstract
This selection offers an analysis of several important symbols and rituals in biomedicine, ones that nearly every patient and health care provider run into on a daily basis. The simple technologies discussed here include the doctor's white coat, the ordering and interpretation of laboratory tests, and the use of specialized vocabulary. As with most aspects of culture, these symbols and rituals are expected and usually go unremarked and unanalyzed. A medical anthropological view of biomedical culture and behavior, however, requires us to examine these symbols and rituals for what they may reveal about the ethnomedical system of which they are a part.
The anthropological concept of material culture refers to actual things that people have created to do work. The functions of objects of material culture can be both practical and symbolic. Medical anthropologists have argued that the physical "toolkit" of healers throughout the world (and in different historical periods) is important in the process of healing. That is because those tools create meaning; the manipulation of those tools by a special individual-the healer-is central to the process of the healing ritual. The tools described here-the white coat, the lab tests, the specialized vocabulary-are all elements of the creation of belief in the shamanistic complex first described by Claude Lévi- Strauss (see the selection in Chapter 18). Symbols help the healer to believe in her own powers while at the same time to enhance the beliefs of the patient and his social group. The white coat is a powerful symbol that affects the way people interact-just ask medical students about how they felt and how people treated them the first time they wore the coat in a clinical setting. In fact, the white coat ceremony is one step in the rites of passage by which one becomes a doctor. Conversely, when a patient is required to take off her clothes and put on a thin hospital gown that hangs open in the back, symbolic cultural meanings of vulnerability and submissiveness are communicated.
Metrics
134 Record Views
Details
- Title
- Beyond the Doctor's White Coat
- Creators
- Bisan Salhi
- Contributors
- Peter J Brown (Editor)Svea Closser (Editor)
- Publication Details
- Understanding and Applying Medical Anthropology, pp 204-212
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- Book chapter
- Language
- English
- Academic Unit
- Emergency Medicine
- Other Identifier
- 991021903256804721