{"id":2775,"date":"2019-07-29T12:29:53","date_gmt":"2019-07-29T16:29:53","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/socialmed\/?post_type=directory&#038;p=2775"},"modified":"2025-06-12T13:50:28","modified_gmt":"2025-06-12T17:50:28","slug":"barry-saunders","status":"publish","type":"directory","link":"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/socialmed\/directory\/barry-saunders\/","title":{"rendered":"Barry Saunders"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>BS 1981,\u00a0University of North Carolina \u2013 Chapel Hill<br \/>\nMD 1986,\u00a0University of Maryland \u2013 Baltimore<br \/>\nMA 1989, and PhD 2000, Religion &amp; Culture,\u00a0University of North Carolina \u2013 Chapel Hill<\/p>\n<p>In Social Medicine I work from two kinds of training\u2014in medical doctoring (general internal medicine) and in an unholy mix of humanities disciplines. I am a cultural anthropologist of contemporary biomedicine and teaching hospitals\u2014using approaches from philosophy, anthropology, religious studies, history, and literary criticism. I consider how medicine and hospitals are, among other things, like religious institutions, with their own doctrines and scriptures, rituals and priesthoods, sacred spaces and objects.<\/p>\n<p>Within health\/medical humanities, these days I am most engaged with scholars doing critical and materialist medical studies, particularly medical STS (science, technology, &amp; society). 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 relate to older forms of colonial discipline and biopower. In this current era of \u201cevidence-based medicine,\u201d I am interested in how textual, rhetorical, and imaging techniques condition what seems evident\u2014and more specifically 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,\u00a0<em>CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Noninvasive Cutting<\/em>\u00a0(Duke University Press, 2008), is an ethnography and philosophical history of CT (computed tomography) scanning. My current book project is an intellectual history of \u201cchiasms\u201d\u2014optic, rhetorical, and philosophical\u2014at particular junctures of late modernity.<\/p>\n<p>For 20 years, until December 2011, I was an emergency physician at Chatham Hospital in Siler City, NC. In Chatham I have been involved in some collaborative community research. And I have been involved in the evaluation of several telemedicine projects.<\/p>\n<p>In UNC\u2019s School of Medicine, I teach in (and help direct) <a href=\"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/socialmed\/education-training\/shs1-2\">Social and Health Systems 1\/2<\/a>, the first-year seminar course at UNC that helps students gain early critical purchase on their socialization into the medical profession. I also teach in, and presently direct, the second-year\u00a0<a href=\"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/socialmed\/education-training\/shs3\">Social and Health Systems 3 Seminars<\/a>. I coordinate a Social Medicine electives program in which various faculty colleagues mentor student projects; I also co-coordinate (with Sue Estroff) the Scholarly Concentration in Humanities &amp; Social Sciences, which serves ~12 students in each medical school class. In most years I supervise a few individual student cultural studies projects relating to biomedicine or comparative healing systems. Outside the School of Medicine, I teach graduate seminars and serve on graduate thesis committees in several departments where I have adjunct appointments: Anthropology, Religious Studies, Communication. I have taught undergraduate seminars in the Honors Program concentration in Literature, Medicine, &amp; Culture and have served as a medical school liaison for the Literature, Medicine, &amp; Culture MA program in the Dept of English &amp; Comparative Literature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>BS 1981,\u00a0University of North Carolina \u2013 Chapel Hill MD 1986,\u00a0University of Maryland \u2013 Baltimore MA 1989, and PhD 2000, Religion &amp; Culture,\u00a0University of North Carolina \u2013 Chapel Hill In Social Medicine I work from two kinds of training\u2014in medical doctoring (general internal medicine) and in an unholy mix of humanities disciplines. I am a cultural &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/socialmed\/directory\/barry-saunders\/\" aria-label=\"Read more about Barry Saunders\">Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":2875,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_links_to":"","_links_to_target":""},"class_list":["post-2775","directory","type-directory","status-publish","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","odd"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v26.8 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>Barry Saunders | Department of Social Medicine<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.med.unc.edu\/socialmed\/directory\/barry-saunders\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Barry Saunders | Department of Social Medicine\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"BS 1981,\u00a0University of North Carolina \u2013 Chapel Hill MD 1986,\u00a0University of Maryland \u2013 Baltimore MA 1989, and PhD 2000, Religion &amp; Culture,\u00a0University of North Carolina \u2013 Chapel Hill In Social Medicine I work from two kinds of training\u2014in medical doctoring (general internal medicine) and in an unholy mix of humanities disciplines. 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