Conversation with Lisa Gabbert

About

This entry in the Benjamin Botkin Folklife Lecture Series offers an overview of the occupational folklore that exists among physicians in the United States today. Much of this folklore is humorous, but it can also be earthy and quite dark.

Lisa Gabbert is a Professor of Folklore Studies in the Department of English and Director of the Folklore Program at Utah State University. Her research interests include folklore and landscape, festivity and play, and occupational folklore in medical contexts. She is the author of “Winter Carnival in a Western Town: Identity, Change, and the Good of the Community” (2011, Utah State University Press); with Keiko Wells, “An Introduction to Vernacular Culture in America: Society, Region, and Tradition” (2017 Maruzen Press, Tokyo); and “The Medical Carnivalesque: Folklore among Physicians” (Indiana University Press 2024). Gabbert focuses on folklore that emerges in physician-to-physician communication, arguing that the content and themes are strikingly parallel to the ones identified by Russian intellectual Mikhail Bakhtin in his concept of the carnivalesque, which is drawn from his analysis of medieval and early modern European culture, particularly pre-Lenten Carnival and the marketplace. In this conversation, Gabbert suggested that, as an occupation, medicine is permeated by the suffering of both patients and physicians, which forms the basis for the medical carnivalesque. Examples and materials are drawn from interviews she conducted…

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Library of Congress

Language

English

Country

United States

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