Notes

[1] In tracing the development of the medical gaze, Foucault (1973 Foucault, M. 1973. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, London: Tavistock.  [Google Scholar], pp. 75–80) drew attention to the implementation of professional standards of competence for doctors in post-Revolution France. Of interest is that, alongside the emergence of a new form of medical science based on biology, a system of examinations was instituted to maintain professional standards of competence, and a professional regulatory body was established to surveil and judge its practitioners. He also drew attention to the new form of medical training which emphasized seeing and doing under the clinician's expert tutelage at the patient's bedside, still very evident in modern medical schools in the common medical maxim ‘see one, do one, teach one’ (Foucault 1973 Foucault, M. 1973. The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception, London: Tavistock.  [Google Scholar], p. 110).

[2] Interestingly, Berg (1996 Berg, M. 1996. Practices of reading and writing:the constitutive role of the patient record in medical work. Sociology of Health and Illness, 18(4): 499–524. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) draws attention to the role of the medical record and case notes in mediating relations within the hospital. He argues that the medical record forms a crucial site in the sociotechnical organization of medical work and in the ongoing construction of hierarchies between medical professionals and patients, and also between medical and allied health professionals who work within hospitals.

[3] The hidden curriculum in higher education more generally has also been described and analysed in detail (see for example, Margolis 2001 Margolis, E. 2001. The Hidden Curriculum in Higher Education, New York: Routledge. E. (ed) [Google Scholar]).

[4] However, he does not elaborate how medical education achieves this, or indeed why curriculum planners would plan the tortuous and brutalizing pathways described in many autobiographies of medical training in order that students become caring and compassionate doctors (Pollock 1996 Pollock, D. 1996. Training tales:U.S. medical autobiography. Cultural Anthropology, 11(3): 339–361. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]).

[5] In fact, the term melena refers to black, tarry stools and is evidence of gastro-intestinal bleeding from the upper gut.

[6] Although respondents used the term, ‘do as I say, not as I do’ to describe the discrepancies between the curricula objectives and actual clinical practice, the term, ‘do as they say, not as I do’, may be more accurate in some instances; they being the curriculum planners who develop the objectives that should guide clinical practice in medical educational settings. Clinical teachers (faculty, senior and junior clinicians, as well as senior students) are the group who mediate both these objectives and actual clinical practice.