ABSTRACT
Cognitive psychologists use an analytic term very similar to that of Becker’s perspective, that of the ‘schema’. The content of the schemas may deal with personal relationships, such as attitudes towards the self or others, or impersonal categories. The moral aim of medical action is often expressed among students by disparagement of the military, which is, for them, the antithesis of medicine; it is described as hierarchical and hide-bound by tradition but, above all, being concerned with causing death and not, as they hold medicine is, with preserving life. The association of dispositions with particular settings or fields, and the power of the archetypal dispositional setting to minimise conflict, is found in a consideration of Becker’s account of the Emergency Room [Casualty], which is so important both historically and currently to medical schools.
