ABSTRACT
The sum of the intersections between medicine, medical education, politics and aesthetics can be framed as the work of the “medical humanities”. Thus, in medical education, the aesthetic realm can include dealing with disgust in first clinical encounters with wounds and death, as well as the sensory pleasures of watching someone return to health. Aesthetics, the manipulation of the sensible fabric of the world and responses to qualities, is a historically and culturally inflected phenomenon. The quality of a practice is its aesthetic dimension, readily known by how it engages the senses. Augusto Boal aestheticized Paulo Freire’s political project by using theatrical frameworks through which protest and resistance could be rehearsed as critical interrogation of oppressive social and political forms. The aesthetics of political exchanges are squeezed out or forced under, only to return in distorted forms, as ugly politics – Machiavellian, and cut-throat neo-liberal.
