After putting down this weighty (in all senses of the word) collection,
the reader, be she or he physician or social scientist, will (or at
least should) feel uncomfortable about her or his taken-for-granted
commonsense (therefore cultural) understanding of medicine. The editors
and their collaborators show the medical leviathan, warts and all, for
what it is: changing, pluralistic, problematic, powerful, provocative.
What medicine proclaims itself to be - unified, scientific, biological
and not social, non-judgmental - it is shown not to resemble very much.
Those matters about which medicine keeps fairly silent, it turns out,
come closer to being central to its clinical practice - managing errors
and learning to conduct a shared moral dis- course about mistakes,
handling issues of competence and competition among biomedical
practitioners, practicing in value-laden contexts on problems for which
social science is a more relevant knowledge base than biological
science, integrating folk and scientific models of illness in clinical
communication, among a large number of highly pertinent ethnographic
insights that illuminate medicine in the chapters that follow.