Interplay between traditions and being professionals

pp. 93-109

in: Gloria Dall'Alba, Learning to be professionals, Berlin, Springer, 2009

Abstract

Against the background of the history of medicine and critical examination of the biomedical model in the previous chapter, this chapter explores some ways in which the traditions of practice for medicine play out for those learning to be medical practitioners in the contemporary western world. Through this investigation, we see that contemporary medical programmes can "echo the historic tensions", in the words of the quote above. As we saw in Chapter 1, this is also the case for other professional education programmes. While we take the medical education programme at Karolinska Institute as an empirical example, the challenges that are explored in this chapter can be seen to have parallels in many other professions. These challenges include power relations between professionals and clients, emotional demands of