From ‘dirty wound care’ to ‘woundology’: a professional project for wound healing clinicians

This article explores the professional project for an emergent subaltern specialist community of wound healing clinicians. Drawing on the literature on professions and boundary work, it examines how wound healing clinicians challenge the perception of their work as ‘dirty’ and seek its transformation into a specialism of ‘woundology’. The article is based on an ethnography of a UK multidisciplinary team of doctors and nurses with an interest and expertise in wound healing, who work as clinical academics and provide wound care services in outpatient clinics. It demonstrates that wound healing clinicians vindicate their professional status by seeking to enthral the medical community in ‘dirty wound care’ as a focused clinical specialty of ‘woundology’. Through training nurses to do medical wound care work, educating clinicians from other specialties about wounds and undertaking wound research, wound healing clinicians assert the professional boundaries of their specialism and its fit with mainstream medicine without embellishing the dirty aspects of their work