Publication details
Medycyna jako reprodukowana bezsilność: Codzienność czeskiej medycyny reprodukcyjnej z punktu widzenia lekarzy i lekarek
| Title in English | Medicine as a reproduced powerlessness: Everyday routine of Czech reproductive medicine in the perspective of physicians |
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| Authors | |
| Year of publication | 2014 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
| MU Faculty or unit | |
| Citation | |
| Description | The chapter aims to provide deepr insight into the situation of physicians in Czech reproductive medicine within two important contexts: the post-socialist restructuring of the health care systém and more general changes of the status of the medical profession. The analysis focuses on two subfields of reproductive medicine: assisted reproduction and childbirth as representations of the interconnections of everyday lives with medicalized practices. It illustrates the pervasive blurring of their presence in our thinking on the family, normality, gender, bodies, their salience in popular and media accounts of medicine and their openness to commodification and commercialization. The analysis is based on 30 in-depth interviews with medical professionals working in the studied specializations. It reveals how individually perceived personal exhaustion is interconnected with external conditions on the level of organization of everyday hospital work and on a broader level of expectations from the medical profession as such. Professionals´accounts of their everyday experience show how the hegemonic position of (bio)medical expert knowledge is maintained within the hierarchical and rigid settings of the provision of health care, and how it influences the work of medical professionals and their relations with patients. |
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