From Medical Students to Pathologists: the Construction and Practice of Pathological Knowledge in Different Generations, 1950~2010s

Pathology is a specialized knowledge of understanding diseases and an important link between basic medicine and clinical medicine. This project will explore how medical students of different generations have learned pathological knowledge, how they use it in clinical practice, and why they have chosen or will choose to become pathologists. This project will focus on what qualities are required to be a pathologist. Emphases will be place on the daily practice, knowledge as well as skills of pathologists and attending physicians, especially their relationship between the amount of written knowledge and the observation of the pathological tissue. The project will interview medical students and pathologists in different generations and use text analysis as research method. Based on the works of scientific historians Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer’s, this project will classify technology into "material technology", "literary technology" and "social technology", and apply the analytical models of "learning knowledge", "tacit knowledge", "apprenticeship learning" and the way of viewing, to explore the pathological knowledge constructions and their implementations in different generations.

Project ID:PF10901-1062
External Project ID:MOST108-2511-H182-013-MY3