Gridding bodies: a topographical survey of teaching touch in medical school

ABSTRACT Recent technological interventions in healthcare, such as robots or artificial intelligence are often described as being made with algorithms and data points, in contrast to human care, which is couched in terms of intimacy and fleshy encounters, exemplified in the sensory act of touch. In this article I problematize such distinctions by looking at how training the sensory skills of diagnosis also involves technologies with data points, specifically grids. Drawing from ethnographic fieldwork in what is known as a “skills laboratory” in the Netherlands, I focus on how students learn how to perform an abdominal examination, a tactile practice learnt via a grid. Bringing ethnographic material into dialogue with accounts of grids in art history, history of science and computer science, I suggest that gridding is an important, multisensory and multimodal practice of boundary-making in medicine, but that moreover it helps build clinical perception. In doing so, just as in the making of robots and smart machines, these grids enact their own biopolitical assumptions. This article develops an empirical and theoretical understanding of how technologies and flesh become affectively entangled in the very earliest of clinical encounters.