@article{fd388f06a4b541249d051b3e011c34c2,
title = "Teaching the normal and the pathological: educational technologies and the material reproduction of medicine",
abstract = "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.",
keywords = "Normality, pathology, medical education, epistemology, material history, ETHNOGRAPHY, BODIES",
author = "J. Nott and A. Harris",
note = "Funding Information: This research was conducted as part of the {\textquoteleft}Making Clinical Sense{\textquoteright} project at Maastricht University, funded by the ERC under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation program [grant agreement number 678390]. Some of the revisions were completed while Author 1 was employed at the University of Edinburgh as part of the ERC-funded project {\textquoteleft}The Epidemiological Revolution{\textquoteright} [grant agreement number 947872]. This article has been drawn from a larger collaborative project, {\textquoteleft}Making Clinical Sense: A Comparative Study of How Doctors Learn in Digital Times{\textquoteright} (www.makingclinicalsense.com). Our colleagues on this project have contributed significantly to the ideas developed in this article and offered sage advice on earlier drafts. We would particularly like to thank Andrea and Rachel for their generosity in sharing their own fieldnotes and photographs with us. Their own work from their medical school ethnographies is forthcoming. A version of this paper was shared with the Maastricht University Science, Technology and Society Studies research group during our annual Summer Harvest, and we are grateful for the comments we received, especially those from Denise Petzold. The paper was also presented online at the Society for the Social Studies of Science meeting in 2020, thanks to the organisers and attendees for the discussion which emerged. Mieneke te Hennepe generously toured us around the storerooms of the Rijksmuseum Boerhaave. Finally, we are ever grateful to our friends in the medical faculties at the University for Development Studies, Maastricht University, and Semmelweis University. It is their generosity and openness which has made this research possible. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2023 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.",
year = "2023",
month = apr,
day = "3",
doi = "10.1080/09505431.2023.2171859",
language = "English",
volume = "32",
pages = "214--239",
journal = "Science as Culture",
issn = "0950-5431",
publisher = "Routledge/Taylor & Francis Group",
number = "2",
}