Curricular innovation is ubiquitous in American medical education, reflecting in part dynamic transformations in biomedical knowledge and techniques and in part the political economy of how that knowledge is produced and taught. Curricular innovations also institutionalize continuous deliberations by medical faculties about what constitutes medical competence and how students need to be educated and socialized into the profession. Part III of this book explores a facet of the puzzle on the meaning of physician competence which seeks the source of its symbolic and existential power for...

Curricular innovation is ubiquitous in American medical education, reflecting in part dynamic transformations in biomedical knowledge and techniques and in part the political economy of how that knowledge is produced and taught. Curricular innovations also institutionalize continuous deliberations by medical faculties about what constitutes medical competence and how students need to be educated and socialized into the profession. Part III of this book explores a facet of the puzzle on the meaning of physician competence which seeks the source of its symbolic and existential power for individual physicians and for the profession of medicine as a whole, and turn to examine social practices and discursive interactions in medical training that make competence the essence of professional achievement and identity.