Specialists on Stage: Neurosurgeons, Mass Media, and the Performance of Expertise in the Dutch Welfare State, ca. 1950-1985.

Abstract

This article traces the remarkable transition of the Dutch neurosurgeons from a rather shielded group of specialists in the early 1950s to a publicly accountable professional community by the mid-1980s. It describes how the neurosurgeons aligned their specialty to the problems and sentiments of the welfare state. In doing so, they exchanged traditional notions of expert authority and doctor anonymity for public performances of expertise that enabled them to stage their specialty in a way that resonated with society and served their professional goals. During this professionalization process, they increasingly came to embody the public image they enacted, seamlessly blending strategic role-play with the genuine performance of professional identity. By analyzing the way the Dutch neurosurgeons adapted their expert performances to the changing rules of expertise in postwar society, the article addresses the entangled relationship between medicine, media, the state, and society in the second half of the twentieth century.