Still, after travelling to one of the top five centers for a look, I found I could not avoid naming the center I saw — no obscuring physicians' identities or glossing over details.
Physicians' identities are verified through a three-step credential process, at which point they can fill out practice info, exchange contact data with colleagues, connect with former classmates and incorporate secure communication with their care team into treatment, while having connections suggested to them by Doximity, a la LinkedIn.
This helps students to develop a professional physician identity, handling diversity of religious and existential worldviews, training students described as ethically naive, processing difficult clinical experiences, and desisting negative role modeling.
In a review of ethics teaching the authors were nihilistic about its effects and suggested that critical determinants of physician identity operate not within the formal curriculum but in a subtler, less officially recognized "hidden curriculum" [ 1].
This empirical study is strongly grounded in theory and will contribute to the scant body of literature on family physicians' professional identity formation processes in medical schools.
As part of an on-going research program on family physicians' professional identity, we are at the present interested in examining how family physicians construct their professional image in the same academic contexts.
The project makes up part of an international research program on family physicians' professional identity initiated with a 2007 CIHR-funded investigation (MOP-85044) in which we studied processes of medical student identification with family medicine in medical schools [ 3– 5].
However, the influence of institutional discourses on the construction and reconstruction of family physicians' professional identity in academic centres during undergraduate medical training and its influence on career choice has been largely ignored.
To further reverse this trend and, therefore, support students' identification with this profession, more attention should be paid to family physicians' professional identity formation processes in medical schools; further research exploring such processes should thus be conducted.
This rhetoric conjured up an image of an individualized medicine that was part and parcel of elite physicians' professional identity during that period in Britain 28 During the latter part of the 19th century, as laboratory sciences mobilized support from various quarters around their promise to revolutionize medicine, physicians contested this future.
