ABSTRACT
If (largely culinary) resemblances in medicine offer ‘food for thought’, should we be satisfied with the aesthetic pleasure of the meal alone, or should we act as food critics? This chapter answers the question: Why are analogies good to ‘think medicine’ with? Recent work in cognitive psychology suggests that analogy is both the ‘fuel and fire of thinking’. Conceptual reasoning as well as imaginative leaps would not be possible without use of analogy – this is how thinking works, where the mind is a ‘connecting organ’. But the meaning of thinking in medicine cannot be restricted to the individual doctor’s clinical reasoning – it is first and foremost a cultural effect. The storehouse of resemblances passed on through medical education offers a socialization device and a means of constructing identity for trainee doctors, where such cultural meanings can also be exclusive and act as an imperial tool of domination.
Relational structures in resemblances condense information, offering shorthand for pattern recognition through memory retrieval. Such resemblances work because they are at once aesthetically striking and ethically troublesome, and then memorable. In order to make inferences, the brain has to map relational similarities (at the level of ‘knowing’) and not mere similarity attributes (at the level of ‘naming’). Resemblances are thus heuristic (‘thinking and predicting with’) as well as mnemonic (‘recognizing and recalling with’) devices, constituting a modern ‘Art of Memory’.
