This study focuses on medical school professors and their professional values and behaviors, based on the hypothesis that the latter are present in the so-called hidden curriculum in medical education. The primary supposition is that such elements bear a close relationship to medical training, ultimately comprising a culture acquired in medical school over the course of the student's socialization process. This process is as important for professional identity (or belonging to the medical corporation) as the acquisition of skills and technical contents related to the actual exercise of the medical profession per se. The study thus analyzed the life histories of several professors from a public medical school in Rio de Janeiro, concentrating on the categories of autonomy, service ideal, clinical reasoning, and inter-peer relations as defined in the Sociology of Professions, in addition to recording specific reports on the careers of physicians who had become professors. We used oral histories obtained through eleven interviews with professors from different specialties. The article concludes that medical professors feel nostalgia for a past in which their profession bore unquestionable prestige, meanwhile expressing bewilderment at new situations, especially restrictions over their autonomy as liberal professionals. Lacking a policy proposal for either the teaching school or the medical corporation, they are less motivated than in the past, and this may constitute a negative factor in the socialization and formation of ethical values among their students.
Medical profession; medical teaching; hidden curriculum; oral history