Barry Saunders

In Social Medicine Barry Saunders works from two kinds of training—in medical doctoring (general internal medicine) and in a set of humanities disciplines. He is a cultural anthropologist of contemporary biomedicine and teaching hospitals—using approaches from philosophy, anthropology, history, and literary criticism. He considers how medicine and hospitals are, among other things, religious institutions, with their own doctrines and scriptures, rituals and priesthoods. Most of  his academic writing concerns practices of scientific and clinical knowledge-making. He is 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,” he is 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.

His 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 his clinical hat, he provides emergency services at Chatham Hospital in Siler City (where his practice conforms religiously to evidence-based recommendations). In Chatham he has been involved in some collaborative community research. And he has been involved in the evaluation of several telemedicine projects.