Abstract

MARTINEZ MEDINA, Santiago. Doing Carotid Artery in the Anatomy Laboratory. Practice and Materiality in Medical Education. Rev. colomb. soc. [online]. 2016, vol.39, n.2, pp.31-47. ISSN 0120-159X.  https://doi.org/10.15446/rcs.v39n2.58964.

This paper enquires into how bodies are done in an anatomy lesson. I am interested in the body as materiality and experience, as product of a specific kind of practice, which has the ability to enact the body as a natural and transcendent entity. In order to describe empirically the practice of doing the body through anatomy, I appeal to an ethnographic analysis of hands, students, forceps, cadavers, professors and books, all in a productive relationship. My ethnography is the outcome of my participation for more than a year in anatomical classes and laboratories in two medical schools in Bogotá, Colombia. I produce ethnographic descriptions of specific bodily movements that allow students to learn and practice human anatomy with a range of materialities such as cadavers, books, virtual devices and three-dimensional models. The field notes that I transcribed and analyzed allow me to show the specific events in which an anatomical structure emerges in and through the practice.

In this paper, I will explore the way in which students do arteries in the anatomical amphitheatre. I want to understand, not simply how the student names something as an artery, but how this emerges with all its properties and particularities, including a name. Therefore, my question is not epistemological but ontological. In this way, I show how arteries emerge as sensations and material paths in the laboratory. For that to happen, an oriented space and the involvement of multiple, heterogeneous and partially connected entities are required. Thus, the artery is composed of multiple materialities and multiple experiences in this site. The body is both materiality and sociality, always dependent on the relationships between a large number of entities in the class and the laboratory.

Keywords : Anatomy laboratory; body; ethnography; materiality; ontology; practice.

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