Vania Smith-Oka, an associate professor and cultural anthropologist, explores the complexities of medical training in her book, *Becoming Gods.* She shares insights from her ethnographic research with interns in Puebla, revealing how gender influences their medical experiences and career aspirations. Vania discusses the unique challenges faced by female interns, the embodied learning process of developing a medical self, and the ethical reflections in both medicine and academia. Additionally, she touches on her future research regarding cesarean incisions in Mexico.
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insights INSIGHT
Why The Author Studied Hospitals
Vania Smith-Oka shifted focus from rural ecological work to hospital ethnography after seeing mistreatment of patients.
She pursued why obstetric violence occurred and whether it was learned in medical training.
insights INSIGHT
Gender Shapes Medical Training
Gender stereotypes shape specialty choices and training methods despite equal competence.
Women face sexual harassment and 'dirty trade,' while men face harsher humiliation and bullying.
question_answer ANECDOTE
Turning The Tables On Harassment
Samantha confronted a harassing surgeon publicly and earned the nickname La Respetada.
Her assertive response shifted power and demonstrated a tactical way to resist harassment.
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In Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals (Rutgers University Press, 2021), Vania Smith-Oka follows a cohort of interns throughout their year of medical training in hospitals to understand how medical students become medical doctors. She ethnographically tracks their engagements with one another, interactions with patients, experiences with doctors, and presentations of cases to show how medical students undergo a nuanced process of accumulating knowledge and practical experience in shaping their medical selves. Smith-Oka illuminates the gendered aspects of this process, whereby the medical interns’ gender informs the kind of treatment they receive from other doctors and the kinds of possibilities they imagine for their careers and areas of medical practice. She documents the lives of the interns during which time they develop their medical selves and come to understand the tacit values of medical practice. The book is full of descriptive vignettes and ethnographic details that make it accessible to undergraduate students. It would be of interest to those in medical anthropology, hospital ethnography, medical education as well as people interested in how expertise is acquired and developed. The book examines medical interns’ transformations through ordinary and extraordinary moments, through active and passive learning where they not only acquire new knowledge but also new ways of being.
Vania Smith-Oka is an associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. She is the Director of the Health, Humanities, and Society Program at the John J. Reilly Center.
Reighan Gillam is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Southern California.
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