Experimental futures

An Ethnography of Anatomy and Surgery Education

Rachel Prentice

• Publisher: Duke University Press Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9780822394907
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Surgeons employ craft, cunning, and technology to open, observe, and repair patient bodies. In Bodies in Formation, anthropologist Rachel Prentice enters surgical suites increasingly packed with new medical technologies to explore how surgeons are made in the early twenty-first century. Prentice argues that medical students and residents learn through practice, coming to embody unique ways of perceiving, acting, and being. Drawing on ethnographic observation in anatomy laboratories, operating rooms, and technology design groups, she shows how trainees become physicians through interactions with colleagues and patients, technologies and pathologies, bodies and persons. Bodies in Formation foregrounds the technical, ethical, and affective formation of physicians, demonstrating how, even within a world of North American biomedicine increasingly dominated by technologies for remote interventions and computerized teaching, good care remains the art of human healing.

Table of contents

• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• One. ‘‘A Fascinating Object’’
• Two. Cutting Dissection
• Three. Cultivating the Physician’s Body
• Four. Techniques and Ethics in the Operating Room
• Five. Swimming in the Joint
• Six. Enterprising Bodies in the Laboratory
• Seven. The Anatomy of a Surgical Simulation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index