Biomedicine on Display

Only a few years ago most bloggers were happy, omnivorous amateurs who wrote about anything that happened to pass by their computer screens. Now more and more professionals are discovering the networking powers of the medium. I’m particularly intrigued by the rapid emergence of blogs from all over the medical world—it’s like a prairie fire! Consider, for example, this list of blogs by surgeons and anaestesiologists (taken from SurgeXperiences):

• Notes of an Anesthesioboist, The Ether Way, The Westmead Anaesthesia Blog, Waking Up Costs, i’m so sleepy, The Sandman, Reflections in a Head Mirror, A Chance to Cut is a Chance to Cure, Aggravated DocSurg, Buckeye Surgeon, other things amanzi, Respectful Insolence, Surgeonsblog, Inside Surgery, Hepatobiliary Surgery and Liver Transplantation, Orthopaedic Residency: The Attending Perspective, Orthopedic Sports Medicine, Arthroscopy, Knee and Shoulder Replacement, All things Orthopaedic, The Orthopedic Logbook, Plastic Surgery 101, Suture for a Living, To Nip or To Tuck, Bright Lights Cold Steel, Cut on the dotted line, Flatus and Stool, It’s What I Do, Unbounded Medicine, IntraopOrate, Counting Sheep, Sterile Eye, ISED8U: Adventures in Anaesthesia, Dr Schoor’s Urology Blog, Dr. Keagirl’s Urostream, Robotic Surgery Blog, Sheldon Marks MD, The Independent Urologist

Admittedly, they range from serious institutional blogs to somewhat ridiculous first-person ramblings, but this is part of the charm and strength of the genre. Together these first-hand reports give an amazing insight into the personal and social world of medicine, in this case surgery/anaesthesia. By opening up the otherwise black (or green?) box of the surgical profession, these and many other blogs constitute an important addition to the published sociological, contemporary-historical and autobiographical literature of the field, and a increasingly important source of inspiration for science studies scholars.