Barry F. Saunders
        Assistant Professor

     Dr. Saunders is a physician (general internal medicine) trained in cultural anthropology and religious studies. He studies contemporary biomedicine, hospitals, and diagnostic technologies from a range of humanities perspectives—including social and literary theory, philosophy, and history. He is interested in ways that medicine and hospitals continue to serve cultural functions that are basically religious—in addressing suffering, in training novitiates, in compelling belief, and in refracting certain forms of colonial power. He writes critically about ways of knowing—how scientific, and particularly diagnostic, knowledge is made and revised. He is interested in how medicine represents bodies, how archives manage “evidence,” and how diagnostic intrigues engage judgment. His book, forthcoming from Duke Press, is called CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Noninvasive Cutting.

Dr. Saunders also provides emergency services at Chatham Hospital in Siler City. He has been involved in collaborative social research in Chatham communities.

Dr. Saunders teaches regularly in the first-year Medical Student course, "Medicine and Society"—helping students reflect on social, ethical, and economic aspects of their work, and gain critical purchase on their socialization into the medical profession. He also teaches in the second-year Humanities and Social Science Electives series. And he supervises cultural studies projects relating to biomedicine and comparative health care systems. Outside the School of Medicine, he teaches and advises graduate students in Religious Studies and Anthropology.

You may contact Dr. Saunders by email: bfsaunde@med.unc.edu by phone at: (919) 843-8272; or by post at: CB #7240, Department of Social Medicine / University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill / Chapel Hill, NC 27599-7240.

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