scispace - formally typeset
Open AccessJournal ArticleDOI

Listening-touch, Affect and the Crafting of Medical Bodies through Percussion

Anna Harris
- 01 Mar 2016 - 
- Vol. 22, Iss: 1, pp 31-61
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
It is shown that learning percussion functions not only to perpetuate diagnostic craft skills but also as a way of knowing of, and through, the resource always at hand; one’s own living breathing body.
Abstract
The growing abundance of medical technologies has led to laments over doctors' sensory de-skilling, technologies viewed as replacing diagnosis based on sensory acumen. The technique of percussion has become emblematic of the kinds of skills considered lost. While disappearing from wards, percussion is still taught in medical schools. By ethnographically following how percussion is taught to and learned by students, this article considers the kinds of bodies configured through this multisensory practice. I suggest that three kinds of bodies arise: skilled bodies; affected bodies; and resonating bodies. As these bodies are crafted, I argue that boundaries between bodies of novices and bodies they learn from blur. Attending to an overlooked dimension of bodily configurations in medicine, self-perception, I show that learning percussion functions not only to perpetuate diagnostic craft skills but also as a way of knowing of, and through, the resource always at hand; one's own living breathing body.

read more

Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI

How does health feel? Towards research on the affective atmospheres of digital health:

TL;DR: This essay draws on previously published literature on affective atmospheres to demonstrate and explain the implications of this scholarship for future theoretical and empirical scholarship about digital health practices that pays attention to their affective and sensory elements.
Journal ArticleDOI

The Making of the Unborn Patient: A Social Anatomy of Fetal Surgery

M. B. Mahowald
- 21 Jul 1999 - 
TL;DR: The scientific books will also be the best reason to choose, especially for the students, teachers, doctors, businessman, and other professions who are fond of reading.
Journal ArticleDOI

Body pedagogics: embodied learning for the health professions.

TL;DR: This article introduces readers to ‘body pedagogics’ as a framework that can help to re‐establish embodiment as a central principle of HPE.
Journal ArticleDOI

Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Breath, Body and World.

TL;DR: This essay aims to address the lacuna that exists in the examination of the meanings and embodiment of breath as a central theme in the humanitics and social sciences.
References
More filters
Book

Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation

TL;DR: This work has shown that legitimate peripheral participation in communities of practice is not confined to midwives, tailors, quartermasters, butchers, non-drinking alcoholics and the like.
Book

Phenomenology of Perception

TL;DR: Carman as discussed by the authors described the body as an object and Mechanistic Physiology, and the experience of the body and classical psychology as a Sexed being, as well as the Synthesis of One's Own Body and Motility.
Book

Laboratory Life: The Construction of Scientific Facts

TL;DR: The authors presents laboratory science in a deliberately skeptical way: as an anthropological approach to the culture of the scientist, drawing on recent work in literary criticism, the authors study how the social world of the laboratory produces papers and other "texts,"' and how the scientific vision of reality becomes that set of statements considered, for the time being, too expensive to change.
Book

The Perception of the Environment: Essays on Livelihood, Dwelling and Skill

Tim Ingold
TL;DR: The Perception of the Environment as discussed by the authors is a collection of essays focusing on the procurement of livelihood, what it means to "dwell" and on the nature of skill, weaving together approaches from social anthropology, ecological psychology, developmental biology and phenomenology in a way that has never been attempted before.
Journal ArticleDOI

Posthumanist Performativity: Toward an Understanding of How Matter Comes to Matter

TL;DR: The ubiquitous puns on "matter" do not, alas, mark a rethinking of the key concepts (materiality and signification) and the relationship between them, rather, it seems to be symptomatic of the extent to which matters of "fact" have been replaced with matters of signification (no scare quotes here).
Related Papers (5)