Teaching the normal and the pathological: Educational technologies and the material reproduction of medicine (2023)
That pathology and normality exist on a complex spectrum of bodily manifestation is an enduring problem at the heart of the philosophy, anthropology and history of medicine. As the primary locus for the reproduction of medicine, medical schools are important sites for cultivating knowledge of what is normal and what is not. Here students come to engage with the slippery concepts of normality and pathology in collaboration with a wide range of educational technologies – the cadavers, plastic models, illustrations and diagnostic tools which corral student knowledge of the body in both health and disease. These technologies are not universally employed across medical faculties, and variations in their use contributes to various constructions of pathology and normality. Ethnographic observation and historical research in medical faculties in Hungary, the Netherlands and Ghana, shows that educational practices are shaped by the epistemic traditions which manifest in the material environment of the medical school, and that these different sociomaterial settings contribute to inconsistent notions of normalcy. Although educational technologies often tend towards fixity in their representations of the body in health and disease, medical school practice in the north of Ghana resists the imposition of the often alien standards typically found in teaching materials imported from Europe or North America. By teaching around and beyond these materials, Ghanaian educators also challenge their assuredness and the intellectual history of contemporary medicine.
...MoreSimilar Citations
Thesis
Knowles, S A;
(cited 2010)
“A Certain Portion of the Whole.” Inspectors, Guardians and Anatomists in East Anglia: 1832--1908
(/isis/citation/CBB001567238/)
Thesis
Sethi, Sherrilyn M.;
(2012)
Mortuus Mox: The Pedagogical Approach to Cadaveric Dissection in the United States and the Anatomy of the Corpse Poem
(/isis/citation/CBB001567413/)
Article
Anna Harris;
(2023)
Making Measuring Bodies
(/isis/citation/CBB084147277/)
Article
Élodie Giroux;
(2021)
Can populations be healthy? Perspectives from Georges Canguilhem and Geoffrey Rose
(/isis/citation/CBB887442116/)
Article
Ivan Moya Diez;
(2018)
Canguilhem avec Goldstein: De la normativité de la vie à la normativité de la connaissance
(/isis/citation/CBB403533464/)
Article
Willemijn Ruberg;
(2021)
Infanticide and the influence of psychoanalysis on Dutch forensic psychiatry in the mid-twentieth century
(/isis/citation/CBB558146669/)
Article
Matteo Vagelli;
(2018)
De la science des monstres: Canguilhem et la tératologie expérimentale d’Étienne Wolff
(/isis/citation/CBB647211350/)
Chapter
Kateřina Lišková;
Alain Giami;
Sharman Levinson;
(2021)
Sexology’s Unexpected Progressiveness in the Cold War East: Shaping People’s Sexual Selves, Creating Socialist Societies
(/isis/citation/CBB700487405/)
Article
Lafferton, Emese;
(2007)
The Magyar Moustache: The Faces of Hungarian State Formation, 1867--1918
(/isis/citation/CBB000831415/)
Chapter
Jon Meddings;
(2021)
Foreword
(/isis/citation/CBB702133186/)
Book
Robert Lampard;
David B. Hogan;
Frank W. Stahnisch;
James R. Wright Jr;
(2021)
Creating the Future of Health: The History of the Cumming School of Medicine at the University of Calgary, 1967-2012
(/isis/citation/CBB411466185/)
Article
Elan D. Louis;
(2021)
The Neurological Study Unit: “A Combined Attack on a Single Problem from Many Angles”
(/isis/citation/CBB571180722/)
Chapter
James R. Wright, Jr.;
(2021)
The Dean Watanabe Years, 1981-1992
(/isis/citation/CBB338845499/)
Chapter
Robert Lampard;
David B. Hogan;
Frank W. Stahnisch;
James R. Wright;
(2021)
Final Thoughts
(/isis/citation/CBB126475249/)
Book
Ellen S. More;
(2017)
Beating the Odds: The University of Massachusetts Medical School A History, 1962–2012
(/isis/citation/CBB336239265/)
Article
Reinarz, Jonathan;
(2008)
Unearthing and Dissecting the Records of English Provincial Medical Education, c. 1825--1948
(/isis/citation/CBB000930672/)
Article
Anderson, Warwick;
(2008)
Teaching “Race” at Medical School: Social Scientists on the Margin
(/isis/citation/CBB000953519/)
Chapter
Dana A. Freiburger;
(2017)
“To Any Degree”: Jesuit Medical Schools in the Nineteenth-Century United States
(/isis/citation/CBB030198470/)
Article
Laura Kelly;
(2017)
Irish Medical Student Culture and the Performance of Masculinity, c. 1880–1930
(/isis/citation/CBB197683118/)
Book
Kim, Hoi-Eun;
(2014)
Doctors of Empire: Medical and Cultural Encounters between Imperial Germany and Meiji Japan
(/isis/citation/CBB001422439/)
Be the first to comment!