Paper short abstract:

Anatomy is regarded as the rite de passage for medical students. Taking an anatomy lab in Taiwan as the site, this fieldwork aims to elucidate the affect and material encounters of anatomy in an East Asian context.

Paper long abstract:

The discussion of East Asian anatomy practices focuses on Confucian and colonial conceptions of the body. In 21st Century Taiwan, these practices are often explained with the “medical humanities turn” back in the 1990s and the Tzu-Chi tradition, a donation and education model developed with a Buddhist discourse that regards the donors’ bodies as sanctificated silent mentors or dati laoshih (gross anatomy teachers). This fieldwork discloses different relations with the cadaver outside the Tzu-Chi tradition and its popular representation.

Through lab practices such as dealing with rouxie (meat crum), students are gradually brought into the stressful and ambivalent space and must endure and suppress negative affects that would still be manifested through jokes. The stressful and somewhat isolated space pushes students into liminality. Aside from the spatio-temporal arrangement, this fieldwork also focuses on materials, especially fascia, whose definition in anatomical nomenclature differs from the lab usage: it becomes the tissues removed in order to “zhochu (make)” structures on the checklist. Removing fascia is actually the most time-consuming activity in lab, and the empirical ontology of rouxie, fascia, and fats indicates the ambivalent and liminal character of the cadaver and the communitas in lab.

Analyzing material and affective conditions of the liminal, this fieldwork sketches anatomy as a rite de passage for both the life and dead. As a medical student, the practicing ethnographer of this fieldwork could serve as a case to discuss the role of anthropology, along with other “medical humanities,” after the medical education reform in the 1990s.

Paper short abstract:

Echoing advocacy that proposed cultural and structural competency, this paper introduces the teaching course "Walking Classroom” in rural internships for medical students and discusses the ways of enhancing students' awareness of health inequality and decolonizing medical education in Taiwan.

Paper long abstract:

This paper introduces a novel teaching approach, the "walking classroom," implemented during rural healthcare internships for medical students. Anthropology has been overlooked in Taiwan's medical education for historical reasons, but suggests that innovative teaching methods can effectively reintroduce anthropological thinking into clinical training. This paper explores the potential integration of anthropological concepts into medical education through innovative methods. While anthropology played a crucial role in Taiwanese medical education during the Japanese colonial period, its significance declined with the rise of biomedical sciences over the past century. The post-pandemic era has witnessed a renewed emphasis on social sciences in healthcare education, prompting a shift in medical education evaluations towards prioritizing medical humanities courses in Taiwan. Despite this shift, there is a need for consensus among educational practitioners regarding understanding medical humanities education.

Recent advocacy has proposed cultural and structural competency concepts to enhance healthcare professionals' understanding of how social, historical, and cultural factors impact health, serving as a gateway for medical humanities education. However, the integration of anthropology into the curriculum needs to be improved due to limited course structures. The paper details a one-year "walking classroom" program immersing medical students in indigenous communities, utilizing photovoice for guided anthropological observations. Addressing pronounced health inequality in remote areas of Taiwan, the programme aligns with the "Indigenous Health Act" to enhance students' cultural sensitivity. Through the descriptive expressions of students' photovoice practices, this paper further discusses the possibility of enhancing students' structural competency and decolonization of medical education.

Paper short abstract:

This paper delves into how medical students utilize autoethnography to comprehend immigrant health issues in Taiwan, facilitating moral distress and ethical inquiry. It highlights autoethnography's role in training, fostering self-awareness while navigating identity transitions and vulnerability.

Paper long abstract:

Autoethnography has gained prominence in critical social and anthropological research literature over the last two decades. Taiwan also embraces this research methodology. As defined, autoethnography is ethnographic research conducted on one's "own people" from the inside. It is generally first-person writing based on a synthesis of ethnography and history of life that, through narrative and emotions, reveals multiple layers of self-awareness.

This paper details how healthcare providers and students can benefit from autoethnography as a teaching and learning approach. Autoethnography is a form of meditation that teaches people to sit comfortably with questions without definite answers. It also teaches people to accept themselves with kindness and understanding, regardless of feelings of hurt, anxiety, or insecurity. Autoethnography can facilitate medical students, interns, and doctors' inquiry into moral distress, ethical dilemmas, and complex issues and seek relief during stressful situations, emotional or competency-based setbacks, and identity transitions in the healthcare profession.

This paper examines two cases in which a medical student and junior doctor used autoethnography to understand socio-cultural issues in Taiwan. Based primarily on the author's previous study, it investigates factors influencing Vietnamese immigrant families' health perspectives and beliefs. It further emphasizes the importance of education on anthropological concepts in clinical training and reflects on personal insights as a Vietnamese immigrant child and a medical student. It explores how medical students can utilize autoethnography to understand identity transitions between students and physicians. Moreover, the study probes how they deal with their emotions, particularly when exposed to unspeakable vulnerability.

Paper short abstract:

This report presents a Bourdieusian analysis of teaching and learning anthropology in a medical school in Taiwan. With an emphasis on the mutual constitution and constraint between the medical field and agentive practice, it presents a local case within the globalized medical education discourse.

Paper long abstract:

Since the late 19th century, anthropology has been assigned a constitutive role in the development of medical education, and this role was later reformulated in the growing domain of medical humanities. In contrast to the global discourse of modern medical education, this report presents a local story from the experience of an anthropologist teaching Anthropology in a medical school.

Based on the findings from the author’s previous studies, which focused on the medical habitus and social and behavioral sciences education in Taiwan’s medical schools, this report presents a realistic description of Anthropology in Medical Education. Field observations and critical reflections are also included to demonstrate how Medical Education works as the formative field forging social sciences knowledge, including Anthropology, into future physicians.

This story is a Bourdieusian analysis that delves into how different actors within and without a medical institute come together to form the conditions of teaching and learning anthropology. Besides, different cultural layers of the medical profession, medical schools, and medical students can also influence this process considerably. The last, but not the least, factor of concern is the policy and structural factors working on this picture.

Keywords: Medical Education, Anthropology, Medical Humanities, Global Discourse, Local Experience, Medicine as Institution and Culture