Melbourne School of Population and Global Health - Theses
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ItemThe anatomy lesson: an examination of the medical body as represented in contemporary anatomical art( 2005)In this thesis I examine issues raised by works of contemporary art that depict the anatomically dissected body. In recent centuries representations of the anatomical body have become synonymous with the medical body. This analysis of contemporary artworks reclaiming the trope of the anatomical body thus allows room for critical reflection on the culturally constructed nature of the modern medical body. Discussion centers around three pieces in particular: Body Worlds, an exhibition of plastinated corpses by Gunther von Hagens; Hymn, an enlarged dissected torso sculpture by Damien Hirst; and Science of the Heart, a video installation by Bill Viola incorporating a projection of a surgically dissected heart. In each chapter I explore how the artwork reveals, reflects, reproduces and contests current conceptualisations of the medical body, often in problematic ways. Issues of commodification, gender and technology are examined through detailed textual analysis of each artwork, the discussion drawing upon a range of critical theories including postmodern, feminist and phenomenological theory. The thesis acknowledges the dialectic between medicine and art surfacing from the artworks and aims to extend this into the medical humanities by recognising the pieces as engaged and potentially powerful critical discourses on the state of the body in medical culture today.
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ItemOverseas doctors in Australian hospitals: an ethnographic study of how degrees of difference are negotiated in medical practice( 2009)In this thesis I ethnographically examine overseas doctors' negotiations of hospital settings that are similar, yet simultaneously unfamiliar, to those they have previously known. The study foregrounds the social labour involved in moving medical practices from one clinical context to another, a process too often hidden from view in the myth of medical universalism. The stories take place in hospitals on the metropolitan fringes of a large city in Australia. The research assumes that doctors with overseas (i.e. non-Australian/New Zealand) medical qualifications have developed a different set of practices to 'locals' because they have received their education and training in medical places 'elsewhere'. In the thesis, I argue that overseas doctors negotiate these various differences with modes of adjustment. I examine adjustment as an embodied, sensory and situated process that entails constant threading between the overseas doctors' past and the environment they find themselves part of, revealing something of both along the way. The overseas doctors' new environment is one that includes an evolving arrangement of people and paperwork, registration and assessment procedures, and buildings and tools. Whilst adjustment to these human and non-human aspects of a doctor's ecological terrain is an everyday event in medicine, I suggest that it is made more obvious by international migration, by practitioners who do not take their new environments for granted. For overseas doctors, subtle variation can mean an exciting, yet more often unsettling world of difference. This research highlights the contextual nature of medical practice, exploring its embeddedness within a multifarious environment. At the same time, the thesis departs from the majority of literature on overseas doctors, and skilled migrants more generally, that regards their skills as too context specific, thus requiring their integration into a nationally distinct system through the acquisition of nationally distinct practices. With this thesis I contribute an empirically and theoretically rich analysis that provides a more nuanced perspective of this political issue in Australia (and other 'receiving countries'). It is a thesis that will be of interest to migration and organisational researchers, medical educationalists, sociologists and anthropologists of science and medicine, individuals and organisations concerned with the steadily growing number of overseas doctors working in hospitals around the world, and last, but not least, overseas doctors themselves.