ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book begins with a series of questions, which the ensuing chapters attempted to address if not to answer, about American biomedicine in particular; about biomedicine as an ethnomedical system. It offers a broad and deep ethnography of the culture of American biomedicine, including a description of the selection and socialization process by which one comes to be a member of the medical guild. The book attempts to locate the professional culture of biomedicine within the larger cultural currents of American society. It aims to link the developmental line of individual practitioners, professional socialization, institutional dynamics, the dynamics of the culture of medicine, and those of American culture. The book illustrates how idiographic research can be reconciled with nomothetic research. It provides a psychoanalytically informed ethnographic method by which a researcher and/or clinician might obtain similar data.
