The topic of professionalism in medicine has dominated the content of major academic medicine publications during the past decade and continues to do so. In this collection of essays, the authors don't argue with those attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism. Instead, they ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or "professionalism." This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession's beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted (or not) in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse. In addition, the authors scrutinize how the discourse is enacted in both the formal and hidden curriculum, and in the larger medical environment.

Zusammenfassung
Professionalism in Medicine: Critical Perspectives casts a careful, and at times wary, eye on a dominant force in contemporary academic medicine that appears to have been accepted as an absolute good. Calls for developing, increasing, or maintaining professionalismnot to mention the current obsession with evaluating or assessing itappear with regularity in medical journals and conference programs of all stripes. The resultant literature has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes and behaviors subsumed under the label "professional" or ''professionalism" (Wear & Kuczewski, 2004). Moreover, the fixation with assessment has become a new steering mechanism that is reductionistic when it shapes the total range of possible and thinkable dimensions of professionalism. The richness, complexity, and contradictions of professionalism in medicine are being flattened into categorical attitudes or behaviors that evaluators (whose professionalism is rarely assessed) can check. As Mark Kuczewski, one of the contributors to this volume, observes, "Valuing and evaluating professionalism seem to have become equated. " This preoccupation with assessment is not indigenous to medical education. It is arising and taking hold of many institutions as new principlesindeed, mandatesof scrutiny and examination become acceptable, if not desirable, cultural practices. In their incisive work on audit cultures in higher education. Shore and Wright (2000) argue that coercive practices of accountability sometimes sound eerily like moves toward "exhibiting" professionalism whereby "every individual is made acutely aware that [his] conduct and performance is under constant scrutiny" (p. 77).

Inhalt
Conceptualizing Professionalism.- The Complexities of Medical Professionalism.- An Analysis of the Discourse of Professionalism.- Professionalism.- Teaching Professionalism.- Medical Professionalism.- Respect for Patients.- You Say Self-Interest, I Say Altruism.- The Role of Ethics Within Professionalism Inquiry.- Medical Professionals and the Discourse of Professionalism.- Assessing Professionalism.- Educating for Professionalism at Indiana University School of Medicine.- The Problem with Evaluating Professionalism.- How Medical Training Mangles Professionalism.- Wit is not Enough.- Professionalism and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.- CODA.- CODA.