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Abstract
The continued existence of care inequities along the axes of race, sex, gender, sexuality, ability, and class suggests that the examination of medical training—the mechanism by which all doctors are taught their craft—may hold the key to shifting this reality. My dissertation, Race, Region, and Gender in Early Emory School of Medicine Yearbooks, examines how patient and student bodies are represented in the yearbooks students create during their training. By analyzing the sociocultural aspects of medical education at Emory School of Medicine after the release of the influential Flexner Report, I build a foundation for understanding how representations shape medical students understandings of potential patients and themselves. The hidden curriculum of medical education is communicated, not in classroom lecture, but in the ways that institutional culture promulgates certain representations over others. An idyllic student and patient emerge that reinforce one another at the expense of bodily diversity among patients and students, exacerbating care disparities through controlling vernacular medical media.
