ABSTRACT
The professional socialization of medical students has the potential to undermine attempts to ensure that doctor-led regulation acts in the public interest. Historically, this has manifested itself in numerous ways. For instance, students have reported how anatomy led them to see people differently. The human body takes on new meaning and a new manner of interacting with the body becomes the norm. ‘Students…describe increasingly experiencing the body as “machinelike”’.1 The invasion of privacy, both physical and mental, which is typical of most doctor-patient encounters, influences fundamentally the way in which the future doctor comes to view the patient. As one doctor has described it:
The first patient I met was a dead man whom I chopped up into increasingly smaller pieces. I had no preparation for what lay behind the dissection room door – the God-awful smell, the sound of the saw slicing off the top of the skull or the sight of genitals swollen in the preservation process. When Ian Kennedy spoke of the tribalism and emotional indifference of doctors in his interim report on organ retention, I tried to take myself back to the dissection room. We didn’t care that much about dead peoples’ parts, because we never met anyone else who did. We were learning to be callous. This attitude remains prevalent. The worse thing anyone can accuse you of as a young doctor is becoming ‘emotionally involved’. Small wonder we can view suffering with such brutal detachment.2
