Medical internship as moral education: an essay on the system of training physicians.

This essay is an attempt to describe and interpret my experience as an intern in internal medicine at a major urban teaching hospital which shall be called simply the Hospital. Drawing upon the work of sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, I place that experience within a broader conceptual framework. By focusing upon the official ideology of the medical service and the unofficial language of interns and residents, upon the hospital's institutions for voicing dissent and its rituals for making status elevation, I investigate the connections among the structural conditions of work, the construction of a community of house officers, the relation of that community to the medical profession at large, and the stability and perpetuation of internship as the institutional form of training for medicine.