The Medical Carnivalesque: Folklore among Physicians by Lisa Gabbert

In The Medical Carnivalesque: Folklore among Physicians (Indiana University Press), folklorist Lisa Gabbert demonstrates that the occupational corpus of folklore, humor, and backstage talk found among physicians in hospital contexts reveals remarkable similarities to Bakhtin’s descriptions of medieval carnival. Featuring topics such as death-related talk, stories about patient bodies, and parodies of medical specialties, she argues that this body of folklore is grounded in extraordinarily difficult work contexts and that the organization, practice, and ethos of medicine can induce suffering in physicians themselves. This conjoining of suffering, humor, death, and the body is what she identifies as the medical carnivalesque.

The Medical Carnivalesque shows us how the culture of contemporary medicine uses travesty, humor, and inversion to address the painful and often transgressive aspects of doctoring; resists the institutionalized nature of suffering; and constitutes a way in which some physicians address core philosophical and existential issues as they go about their daily work.