In this collection of essays, the authors don't argue with those attributes deemed to be the essence of professionalism in medicine. Instead, they ask questions of the discourse from which they arise, how the specialized language of academic medicine disciplines has defined, organized, contained, and made seemingly immutable a group of attitudes, values, and behaviors subsumed under the label professional or professionalism. This collection aims to be a critical text, one that questions the profession's beliefs about the nature of its work and how such beliefs are enacted (or not) in medical education, particularly as they fuel the professionalism discourse.