Main description:

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.

Contents:

Acknowledgements ix

Introduction 1

1. "A Fascinating Object" 33

2. Cutting Dissection 69

3. Cultivating the Physician's Body 103

4. Techniques and Ethics in the Operating Room 137

5. Swimming in the Joint 171

6. Enterprising Bodies in the Laboratory 199

7.The Anatomy of a Surgical Simulation 227

Conclusion 253

Notes 267

References 277

Index 289