Training through Shame: Affect and Temporality in Medical Education

Shame is a temporally sensitive emotion highly relevant to the healthcare context and culturally inscribed within medical education in the United States and United Kingdom. Drawing from feminist, phenomenological, and queer of color conceptions of time and shame, this essay uses narratology to analyze popular medical memoirs of medical training. I propose two primary modes of time within medical training—a linear time and a future-oriented time—and map them onto chronic and acute shame experiences as represented in medical memoirs. Anecdotes from these memoirs suggest both the challenges of medical training and potential opportunities for reshaping the training narrative to better support diverse student experiences and turn the system towards shame-sensitive, humanistic patient care.