"Becoming Gods" with Vania Smith-Oka

Presenting the launch of Becoming Gods: Medical Training in Mexican Hospitals (Rutgers University Press), by Kellogg Faculty Fellow Vania Smith-Oka, featuring a conversation between the author and Seth Holmes, a cultural and medical anthropologist and physician from UC Berkley. 

The book examines how a cohort of doctors-in-training in Puebla, Mexico, learn to become doctors. Smith-Oka draws from compelling fieldwork, ethnography, and interviews with interns, residents, and doctors that tell the story of how medical trainees learn to wield new tools, language, and technology and how their white coats, stethoscopes, and newfound technical, linguistic, and sensory skills lend them an authority that they cultivate with each practice, transforming their sense of self. Becoming Gods illustrates the messy, complex, and nuanced nature of medical training, where trainees not only have to acquire a monumental number of skills but do so against a backdrop of strict hospital hierarchy and a crumbling national medical system that deeply shape who they are.

Cosponsored by the Kellogg Institute for International Studies, the Department of Anthropology, and the John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology, and Values at the University of Notre Dame.