SOCI 70 Chapter Notes - Chapter 3: Gallows Humor
Document Summary
(week 2) cadaver stories and emotional socialization of medical students notes. Socialization in medicine involves feelings about work (esp. troublesome areas) Private curricula: moral dimensions of medical work, uncertainty, limitations and emotions, internal/informal/implicit: norms maintained by humor, used as a coping mechanism in times of stress. Public curricula: technical demands of work, external/formal/explicit. 4 elements: medical student perpetrators, emotionally vulnerable victims (lay people or other medical students), cadavers (whole or body parts), and reality anchors (references to real people/places/tthings) Protagonists are characterized as emotionally detached, happy/fun-loving and victims as isolated outsiders and emotionally weak (exception being cadaver as relative) Role of stories in emotional socialization of med students. Humor shields students from basic content of stories. Distances medical students from presence of cadaver as a human referent. Provides listeners with an alternative allowed source of emotions in lab. Distance accompanied by sense of situational control.
