Hybrid Instruments and Embodiment in Human Patient Simulation

• In Event: 3448 - Open Topic on Sociology of Body and Embodiment

Abstract

Using feminist epistemology in science and technology studies and medical humanities, this paper engages with the qualities of human patient models that are perceived as necessary to negotiate lifelike medical simulation that is acceptable as a rigorous medical training. In doing so, I consider a comparative case of using Florentine wax models in the eighteenth-century medical training in Vienna. This historical case suggests that patient simulation as a tool of medical training puts the authority and credibility of the physician’s profession at stake. The lifelike qualities of the patient simulation in both historical contexts generate a sense of the human that extends beyond the narrowly defined understanding of the patient body as an object of biomedical gaze. By foregrounding the cultural configurations in both cases, my argument clarifies the role of corporeal nonmedical excess in achieving legitimacy of patient simulation. The assumed static boundary between SPs as subjects and wax models as objects in patient simulation might be questioned. I consider both types of patient models as hybrid instruments of medical training. Building on these presumed - or collapsed - boundaries between subjects and objects in patient simulation, I draw attention to the function of corporeal nonmedical excess. By doing so, this paper considers the ways in which cultural configurations become meaningful for the acceptance of patient simulation as a legitimate instrument of medical training.

Author

• Ivana Guarrasi, University of California, San Diego