In Social Medicine I work from two kinds of training—in medical doctoring (general internal medicine) and in a set of humanities disciplines.  I am a cultural anthropologist of contemporary biomedicine and teaching hospitals—using approaches from philosophy, anthropology, history, and literary criticism.  I consider how medicine and hospitals are, among other things, religious institutions, with their own doctrines and scriptures, rituals and priesthoods.  Most of my academic writing concerns practices of scientific and clinical knowledge-making.  I am interested in how diagnosticians organize evidence, in how disease definitions and bodily infirmities are reshaped and redistributed by technologies, and in how our archives, taxonomies, and methods often derive from old forms of colonial discipline.  In this era of “evidence-based medicine,” I am interested in how metrological ways of knowing (measurement, numeracy, standards, statistics) relate to personal ways of knowing (craft-knowledge, judgment, expertise) and the social formations that support them.  My first book, CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Noninvasive Cutting (Duke University Press, 2008), is an ethnography and philosophical history of CT (computed tomography) scanning.

Under my clinical hat, I provide emergency services at Chatham Hospital in Siler City (where my practice conforms religiously to evidence-based recommendations).  In Chatham I have been involved in some collaborative community research.  And I have been involved in the evaluation of several telemedicine projects.

I am a course director for “Medicine and Society,” the first-year Medical School course at UNC which helps students gain early critical purchase on their socialization into the medical profession.  I also teach in the second-year Humanities and Social Science Seminar series.  And I supervise cultural studies projects relating to biomedicine and comparative health care systems.  Outside the School of Medicine, I teach graduate seminars and advise graduate students in a range of departments: Anthropology, Religious Studies, Communication, Literature...