L’œil diagnostique

This article is based on an ethnographic research conducted within an hemodynamic laboratory of a public Italian hospital doing coronary angiographies and angioplasties. By adopting the approaches of Social Studies of Scientific Imaging and Visualization and of Workplace Studies, it reveals how phys...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Barbara Pentimalli
Format: Article
Language:fra
Published: Société d'Anthropologie des Connaissances 2020-09-01
Series:Revue d'anthropologie des connaissances
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Online Access:https://journals.openedition.org/rac/10241
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Summary:This article is based on an ethnographic research conducted within an hemodynamic laboratory of a public Italian hospital doing coronary angiographies and angioplasties. By adopting the approaches of Social Studies of Scientific Imaging and Visualization and of Workplace Studies, it reveals how physicians, radiology technicians and nurses learn this “diagnostic eye” able to notice – with the aid of medical imaging technologies – the suspicious cues signaling a coronary pathology. The article also analyses the path of the ethnographer who, by standing alongside practitioners, learns step by step to see in the images some of these relevant elements. We will see that the ability to notice the signs of a pathology rests on a practical and situated learning to interpret not only what is going on within the screen’s perceptual space but also within the interactional space shared with co-present colleagues, That, in fact, implies the use of multimodal semiotic resources – linguistic instructions, metaphors and aesthetic judgements, deictic gesture, gaze’s orientations, manipulation of artefacts – making the relevant details of the heart ramifications appearing on the screen mutually visible and intelligible.
ISSN:1760-5393