Bodies in Formation: An Ethnography of Anatomy and Surgery Education [Paperback]

Surgeons employ craft, cunning, and technology to open, observe, and repair patient bodies. InBodies 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 Formationforegrounds 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.

InBodies 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.

"Bodies in Formationis a superb ethnography about learning how to practice anatomy and surgery and the challenge posed by the innovation of simulator training. Rachel Prentice deftly charts how students and residents embody germane perceptions, emotions, control, and ethics, as crucial to their training as is cognitive knowledge. She argues convincingly that technologically mediated training does not, as yet, transcend the art of medicine."—Margaret Lock, author ofTwice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death

"In this exceptional work, Rachel Prentice attends to the practices of surgical training anl³#