You Move, It Moves: Prosthetic Technologies in Surgical Practice

• In Event: Replaceable Parts: Prosthetic Technologies in Biomedicine

Abstract

“Taking Surgery Beyond the Limits of the Human Hand™” is one of the trademarks of Intuitive Surgical, manufacturers of the da Vinci® Surgical System (dVSS), the robot-assisted surgical platform that dominates the world market today. In this paper, which draws upon extensive ethnographic observation in the operating theaters of a major University teaching hospital, I explore how attending surgeons and their residents make sense of this ambivalent prosthetic enhancement, one that simultaneously augments their skilled capacities while constructing their “bare” bodies as deficient vis a vis the agencies of the machine. Surgical education programs embrace the cyborg figure of the “da Vinci Surgeon” for it all-but-guarantees post-residency employment for their trainees. At the same time, already evaluated according to a community standard of “machinic virtuosity,” surgeons struggle with the introduction of actually machine-mediated surgical practices in the operating room. They exacerbate perceived threats to surgeons’ professional autonomy in an era of managed care and corporate medicine, and open the practice of surgical craft to unprecedented grammatization and surveillance. This paper considers some of the imagined futures discussed by the medical community – from dystopias of professional obsolescence to utopic reclamations of humanistic medicine in which surgeons finally have the time to “really offer the care that only humans can.”

Author

• Mark Olson, Duke University