Ep. #2 Medical tribes: Tanisha Jowsey talks anthropology in the emergency room and teaching medical students to be human

“Part of my role in teaching medical students is to peel back the inculturation that they’re in, to be able to relate with patients. Remember before you were a med student, what it actually meant to be the person sitting with your dying grandmother…That’s something that, as an anthropologist, that’s part of my role is to be able to see where those boundaries are, what it means to be a doctor, and what it means to not be a doctor.”

Dr. Tanisha Jowsey, an applied medical anthropologist at the University of Auckland (unidirectory.auckland.ac.nz/people/t-jowsey), spoke to our own Julia Brown about how to analyze a medical emergency, how machines and people communicate in the Operating Theatre, and how to manage her position as a pregnant anthropologist when there’s blood on the floor.

Citations:
Rapport, Nigel and Joanna Overing (2000) “Social and Cultural Anthropology: the Key Concepts.” Routledge: London and New York. This open access PDF is available on www.antropologias.com:
www.antropologias.org/files/download…y-concepts.pdf

This anthropology podcast is supported by the Australian Anthropological Society, the schools of Culture, History, and Language and Archaeology and Anthropology at Australian National University, and the Australian Centre for the Public Awareness of Science.

Music by Pete Dabro: dabro1.bandcamp.com

Show notes by Ian Pollock