Haunted by ableism: Ghosts of the past, present, and future in medical education

Neera R. Jain

Social Science & Medicine, 2025, vol. 382, issue C

Abstract: Western medical education teaches a haunted curriculum of ableism. Bringing the hidden curriculum into conversation with hauntology and spectral studies, Ansari et al.’s haunted curriculum invites exploration of how professional education challenges and reproduces specters of injustice. I take Derrida's assertion that the specter brings together the past, present, and future and draw from critical disability theory to argue that medical education is haunted by three morphing ghosts that echo ableism through time. These ghosts illustrate medical education's imputation of bodymind hierarchies, attending to their violent effects towards disabled people as patients and as learners. Elimination/exclusion, the ghost of medicine's past, carries the memory of medical education's involvement in eugenics practices that removed disabled people from society, and its creation of technical standards that sought to exclude disabled people from medical education. Cure/inclusionism, the ghost of medical education's present, may appear more benign but rattles past ableism by perpetuating ideals of cure and maintaining rigid educational standards. Crip/transformation, the ghost of medical education's future, activates Kafer's politics of crip futurity through anti-ableist education and the stories of successful disabled physicians across time. These ghosts carry the possibility for a reckoning. I propose that medical education channel all three of these ghosts, feel the frictions of ableism past, present, and future, learn from them to resist further harm, and transform toward justice for learners and patients.

Keywords: Ableism; Medical education; Haunted curriculum; Medical practice; Disabled medical students; Disabled patients; Disability; Hauntology; Hauntings; Eugenics; Crip theory (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
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DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2025.118321

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