ABSTRACT
Use of the senses, specifically for diagnosis, is central to medicine. Yet medical education does not focus well on how to tune sensibilities as core to an aesthetic medicine. Indeed, medical education can be seen to offer a systematic miseducation of the senses, leading to insensibility. This begins with teaching anatomy through cadaver dissection and continues with learning clinical and communication skills through simulation and developing emotional insulation as a means of defence against over-exposure to affect. Can we take a “whole systems” approach to learning how to use the senses in medical education? This chapter shows how education of the senses at root is a political problem, where sensibility is treated as capital that comes to be owned and distributed by an elite in medicine. A democracy of sensory education can be achieved through an aesthetics of resistance. By an ethical re-arrangement of how sensory capital is produced and distributed, advertised through democratic habits, medical students can reclaim sense capital and intensify sensory-based learning.
