Sensing and the Shadows: Invisible Work in Medical Education in the Netherlands

Abstract

Medical schools are important nodes in the reproduction of medical knowledge, and an often-visited field site for medical anthropologists. To date, the spotlight has been on teachers, students and (simulated) patients. I broaden this focus to look at the practices of medical school secretaries, porters and other staff, investigating the embodied effects of their “invisible work.” Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in a Dutch medical school, I mobilize the more multisensory term “shadow work” to understand how such practices become part of medical students’ future clinical practices through highlighting, isolating, and exaggerating, necessary elements of their medical education.