The Clinical Anatomist: From Anatomical Competency to Professional Identity

Anatomy remains among the most resilient foundations of medicine, yet the professional who applies it most substantively to patient care has no defined professional identity, and the designation clinical anatomist is presently adopted by anyone who wishes to claim it. We argue that this absence is an opportunity rather than a deficiency. Drawing together two literatures that are rarely read side by side, professional identity formation and socialization in medical education and the sociology of professions concerned with expert jurisdiction, we first establish what a professional identity is and then distinguish it from competency: a competency is deployed, whereas an identity is embodied. That distinction resolves an apparent tension between a shared anatomical competency and a distinct subspecialty identity, a principle we term shared competency, asymmetric identity. It also separates three categories the field has understandably spoken of as one: the anatomist (a discipline), the anatomy educator (a role), and the clinical anatomist (an identity). We propose daily, practice-based collaboration directed at patient care as a working criterion for the identity, and the clinical anatomy fellowship as the apparatus through which the identity is formed and reproduced. The definition is offered as a starting point for debate and empirical testing rather than as a settled account.