ABSTRACT
Becoming a doctor entails assimilating a wide variety of knowledge, skills and attitudes required for clinical practice. The Hippocratic oath embodied a basic ethic that is prevalent, including that doctors should act in the best interests of their patients, acknowledge the limits of their own knowledge, recognise that there is an art to medicine with warmth and sympathy towards patients, and maintain patient confidentiality. This chapter considers medical students’ social identities as moral actors within their narratives of professionalism dilemmas encountered within the clinical workplace. The construction of the perpetrator within the narratives could be partly due to the different ways that they considered the people to be at the time, thereby influencing student action. Understanding how medical students narrate their moral identities, therefore, has implications for medical educators in their role of facilitating students’ good ethical practice.
