ABSTRACT
Performing a root canal treatment has been described as working within a “black hole” (Castelucci, 2003: 29). Everything within the tooth is tiny, and it is hard to provide light in the inner structures of the teeth. This poses challenges not only to the practising dentist but also to the student of dentistry. For someone watching a root canal treatment from the side, visual access to anatomical structures, pathological features, and embodied procedures is very restricted. Traditionally, it has therefore been hard or impossible to demonstrate what the professional dentist does or sees during an endodontic procedure. With the recent introduction of the operational microscope, however, the conditions for both doing and demonstrating such procedures have changed. The combination of magnification and coaxial illumination makes it possible to see details that were previously out of sight. By connecting a camera to a microscope, it also becomes possible to record and broadcast the visual field of the dentist. The study reported in this chapter explores how this technological configuration is used in an endodontics course. More specifically, it investigates how relations between what the recordings show and what is actually seen and done in the dentist’s surgery are addressed as practical matters of production, interpretation, and instruction. In interviews, instructors, as well as students, expressed that the use of video was “great” because it showed “how it really looks like,” “what actually happens,” and “how it is done in reality” (cf. Rystedt, Reit, Johansson, & Lindwall, 2013). In the actual demonstrations, however, differences between what appears in the recordings and what the dentists really see and do were recurrently raised.
