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Rattling minds: the power of discourse analysis in a post‐truth world
Author(s) -
Hodges Brian D
Publication year - 2017
Publication title -
medical education
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.776
H-Index - 138
eISSN - 1365-2923
pISSN - 0308-0110
DOI - 10.1111/medu.13255
Subject(s) - suite , power (physics) , citation , sociology , art history , psychology , library science , history , computer science , law , political science , physics , quantum mechanics
It is worth remembering that just as current public and political discourses seem to be overrun by slippery uses of fact and overtly manufactured truths, health care education is not and has never been immune. When American Medical Association president Alfred Still e said, in his inaugural address in 1871, that women were “totally unfit” to practise medicine because of “uncertainty of rational judgment, capriciousness of sentiment, fickleness of purpose” and “a profound contempt for the logic of facts”, he was clearly manufacturing (or at least channelling) a dominant social discourse rather than speaking from a place of research evidence. Fast forward 150 years and we see no end to the hot debate about who is, and who is not, appropriate for admission to medical school. But a careful look reveals that much of what generates the heat is a strange admixture of data, belief and emotion.