Create a Reading List and include this title. Select Add to Reading List on the right.
“Bodies in Formation offers a thoughtful negotiation of the shifting and complex relationships of medicine and technology in a field where the bodies of the patient, student and practitioner are constantly worked upon – and where ways of doing and forms of knowing are perpetually at stake.”—Talia Gordon, Somatosphere
“With adept prose that is both thorough and light on its feet, Prentice’s close and careful ethnography of anatomy and surgical education both helpfully engages and innovatively advances the social scientific study of surgery and embodied learning, more broadly.”—Eric Plemons, Anthropological Quarterly
“Bodies in Formation offers a thoughtful negotiation of the shifting and complex relationships of medicine and technology in a field where the bodies of the patient, student and practitioner are constantly worked upon – and where ways of doing and forms of knowing are perpetually at stake.”—Talia Gordon, Somatosphere
“With adept prose that is both thorough and light on its feet, Prentice’s close and careful ethnography of anatomy and surgical education both helpfully engages and innovatively advances the social scientific study of surgery and embodied learning, more broadly.”—Eric Plemons, Anthropological Quarterly
"In this exceptional work, Rachel Prentice attends to the practices of surgical training and mastery, as well as the ethical problems posed by technological innovation. Given these problems, she suggests that our conceptualizations of the ethical in surgery might be productively rethought. There is no other book like this one; Prentice effectively places bodily practice at the center of questions of reason, innovation, technique, and ethics in science studies."—Lawrence Cohen, author of No Aging in India: Alzheimer's, the Bad Family, and Other Modern Things
"Bodies in Formation is 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 of Twice Dead: Organ Transplants and the Reinvention of Death
If you are requesting permission to photocopy material for classroom use, please contact the Copyright Clearance Center at copyright.com;
If the Copyright Clearance Center cannot grant permission, you may request permission from our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).
If you are requesting permission to reprint DUP material (journal or book selection) in another book or in any other format, contact our Copyrights & Permissions Manager (use Contact Information listed below).
Many images/art used in material copyrighted by Duke University Press are controlled, not by the Press, but by the owner of the image. Please check the credit line adjacent to the illustration, as well as the front and back matter of the book for a list of credits. You must obtain permission directly from the owner of the image. Occasionally, Duke University Press controls the rights to maps or other drawings. Please direct permission requests for these images to permissions@dukeupress.edu.
For book covers to accompany reviews, please contact the publicity department.
If you're interested in a Duke University Press book for subsidiary rights/translations, please contact permissions@dukeupress.edu. Include the book title/author, rights sought, and estimated print run.
Instructions for requesting an electronic text on behalf of a student with disabilities are available here.
Surgeons employ craft, cunning, and technology to open, observe, and repair patient bodies. In Bodies 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 Formation foregrounds 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.