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Boys in White: Student Culture in Medical School
The transition from young layman aspiring to be a physician to the young physician skilled in technique and confident in his dealings with patients is slow and halting. To study medicine is generally rated one of the major educational ordeals of American youth. The difficulty of this process and how medical students feel about their training, their doctor-teachers, and the profession they are entering is the target of this study. Now regarded as a classic, Boys in White is of vital interest to medical educators and sociologists.
By daily interviews and observations in classes, wards, laboratories, and operating theaters, the team of sociologists who carried out this firsthand research have not only captured the worries, cynicism, and basic idealism of medical students--they have also documented many other realities of medical education in relation to society. With some sixty tables and illustrations, the book is a major experiment in analyzing and presenting qualitative data.
By daily interviews and observations in classes, wards, laboratories, and operating theaters, the team of sociologists who carried out this firsthand research have not only captured the worries, cynicism, and basic idealism of medical students--they have also documented many other realities of medical education in relation to society. With some sixty tables and illustrations, the book is a major experiment in analyzing and presenting qualitative data.
470 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1976
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About the author
Howard S. Becker
92 books106 followersHoward Saul Becker was an American sociologist who taught at Northwestern University.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
December 6, 2016
A classic of modern sociology. Boys in white is proof that a dynamic, insightful style of writing in the social sciences is possible, and even more now than sixty years ago. For those of us who are familiarized with Becker's prose, some parts of this book may seem a bit dull -they must surely be the ones in charge of his co-authors. The most engaging chapters are the ones in which the essence of good qualitative analysis takes the lead, all the attention put to digging up for meaning in other people's words and actions. Even if they are not aware of it, but never against their intentions.
June 16, 2012
It's one of those classics you have to read if you're studying the Profession of Medicine. Definitely skimmable and an easy read, there's a lot of detail in there you can probably skip over. I wouldn't read this for fun, but as an academic read, it's useful to know what people are referring to. It's from the 50s, and there have been a lot of changes in medical training since, so who knows what this means for today's doctors.
October 25, 2007
Boys in White is an in-depth study of what collectively motivates medical students. The basic overall finding is that medical students are idealistic about why they want to be doctors and how they will be able to be patient-oriented as doctors, but they fundamentally act as other students do in their years of medical training. They make pragmatic evaluations of how much work and which specific assignments need to be done. The study is divided into sections based on the type of learning environment. These segments include the freshman year, the clinical years, and the future.
The work of the freshman year is lecture, laboratory, and studying. Students enter medical school with the desire to become the best doctor possible and learn everything they can. They quickly find out there is too much information for them to be able to learn everything. The students then devise methods to choose what they should learn. The two competing methods are what they think will help them in practicing medicine and what they think the faculty wants (or what they think the faculty will put on the test). Eventually, the “what the faculty wants” method of studying is adopted by most of the students. This finding is not surprising because it is generally true of students. When there is not enough time to do it all, the student will focus first on areas where he will be evaluated. The researchers thought that medical students might be different because they had been so idealistic going into school. However, for that to be true, one must assume that medical students care more about doing well in their chosen profession than any other type of student.
During the clinical years, the students spend their time on rotations with patients. They must make diagnoses to the faculty and keep write-ups on the patients. For the work part of their schooling, the students still try to please the faculty and set a collective standard for how much work should be done. They want to attain both medical responsibility and clinical experience. They desire medical responsibility because they want to be trusted as being able to take care of patients. They desire clinical experience because they want to actually be capable of caring for the patients. Furthermore, they want a wide variety of clinical experience. Perceptions of medical responsibility and clinical experience influence the students’ perceptions of the future. They judge internships by how much of each they can get. Those who plan to go into general practice feel the need to get as much as possible during their internship, whereas those going into specialties are less concerned because they know their residencies will give them more of each. Students were especially apprehensive about taking on full responsibility for patient care. Many hoped to go into group practice to mitigate this concern. Others chose to specialize so they could be confident of knowing one field. These concerns show that the medical student is still idealistic about helping the patient, even though he was willing to take short cuts in his academic work. At the end of four years of medical school, the medical students still identify themselves as students, not as professionals. A lot of the results of this study are not surprising. In fact, some of them are intuitively obvious. The researchers did a thorough job of documenting the student views and showing that they were collectively held. However, there were no great insights into the culture of medical students beyond what one would expect with a layman’s knowledge of medical school. The book was published in 1961, so it is a interesting that most of their observations still seem to ring true. A follow-up study on student culture might look into how having many more women in medical school has changed the culture as well as the influence of the growing migration to specialties over general practice.
The work of the freshman year is lecture, laboratory, and studying. Students enter medical school with the desire to become the best doctor possible and learn everything they can. They quickly find out there is too much information for them to be able to learn everything. The students then devise methods to choose what they should learn. The two competing methods are what they think will help them in practicing medicine and what they think the faculty wants (or what they think the faculty will put on the test). Eventually, the “what the faculty wants” method of studying is adopted by most of the students. This finding is not surprising because it is generally true of students. When there is not enough time to do it all, the student will focus first on areas where he will be evaluated. The researchers thought that medical students might be different because they had been so idealistic going into school. However, for that to be true, one must assume that medical students care more about doing well in their chosen profession than any other type of student.
During the clinical years, the students spend their time on rotations with patients. They must make diagnoses to the faculty and keep write-ups on the patients. For the work part of their schooling, the students still try to please the faculty and set a collective standard for how much work should be done. They want to attain both medical responsibility and clinical experience. They desire medical responsibility because they want to be trusted as being able to take care of patients. They desire clinical experience because they want to actually be capable of caring for the patients. Furthermore, they want a wide variety of clinical experience. Perceptions of medical responsibility and clinical experience influence the students’ perceptions of the future. They judge internships by how much of each they can get. Those who plan to go into general practice feel the need to get as much as possible during their internship, whereas those going into specialties are less concerned because they know their residencies will give them more of each. Students were especially apprehensive about taking on full responsibility for patient care. Many hoped to go into group practice to mitigate this concern. Others chose to specialize so they could be confident of knowing one field. These concerns show that the medical student is still idealistic about helping the patient, even though he was willing to take short cuts in his academic work. At the end of four years of medical school, the medical students still identify themselves as students, not as professionals. A lot of the results of this study are not surprising. In fact, some of them are intuitively obvious. The researchers did a thorough job of documenting the student views and showing that they were collectively held. However, there were no great insights into the culture of medical students beyond what one would expect with a layman’s knowledge of medical school. The book was published in 1961, so it is a interesting that most of their observations still seem to ring true. A follow-up study on student culture might look into how having many more women in medical school has changed the culture as well as the influence of the growing migration to specialties over general practice.
Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews