ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to reflect on methodological and substantive issues in the study of medical work and culture. It looks forward to an 'ethnopoetics' of medical cultures, while reflecting back on the poetics of our own ethnography. Sanjek has collected a series of autobiographical, reflective accounts by anthropologists on the use of their own and others' fieldnotes. The construction of fieldnotes, diaries and the like, reading and re-reading those documents, writing analytic notes and memos, working papers, theses, journal articles and monographs – these all imply completed processes of textual construction and interpretation. The surgeon reveals the growing catalogue and complexities of the unfortunate patient's troubles through a narrative unfolding, ordered on a chronological basis. Medical work and medical instruction interweave spoken accounts and practical tasks in the daily routines of 'rounds' and consultations. The chapter considers alternative methods of reading and interpreting the same set of ethnographic 'data'.
