Doctor‐patient negotiation of cultural assumptions

This paper simultaneously examines the relationship between norms as features of the social structure and norms as interactional accomplishments. Doctors as cultural members share a set of social facts about women as part of their common stock of knowledge. By posing these facts in a reflexive relationship with the interactional work participants do in specific settings we are able to display how doctors acting as ‘secret apprentices’ ferret cultural assumptions from medical interactions. A detailed comparison of two cases with the same doctor provide the data to examine the ways norms about patients qua women emerged and were negotiated against a background of cultural expectations or assumptions about women. This comparison reveals how divergent assumptions about women emerge, structure the discourse and influence the delivery of health care.