Teaching Epistemic Reflexivity in Medical Education: Reading Michel Foucault and Amitav Ghosh as Pedagogical...

Medical education increasingly acknowledges the importance of teaching structural inequality, colonial histories, social determinants of health, and health inequities. Yet students often encounter a persistent tension between critical reflection and clinical action, asking how such knowledge translates into the practical work of becoming a physician. This article argues that questioning how medical knowledge is produced, authorized, and institutionalized constitutes a form of professional action rather than a departure from it. Drawing on my teaching of the Social and Community Health course within a required pre-clinical medical curriculum, I propose the concept of epistemic intervention as a pedagogical approach that encourages students to examine how evidence, expertise, diagnosis, and clinical authority are historically and politically constituted. Rather than advocating a new canon for medical education, I use Michel Foucault's The Birth of the Clinic and Amitav Ghosh's The Calcutta Chromosome as pedagogical exemplars of a broader educational strategy. Read together, these texts illuminate complementary dimensions of medical knowledge: the institutional production of clinical authority and the persistence of alternative forms of knowing that remain partially invisible to dominant biomedical frameworks. Through patient stories, reflective discussion, and applied bioethical analysis, such interventions can help students cultivate reflexive clinical judgment, epistemic humility, and resistance to premature diagnostic closure. In an era characterized by algorithmic medicine, persistent health inequities, and contested expertise, the article argues that future physicians require not only technical competence but also the capacity to critically evaluate how medicine comes to know what it knows.