ABSTRACT
While there are numerous everyday moments of sensory training which are explored throughout the book, this chapter deals specifically with the training of sensory experts. There are many different kinds of professional sensory expertise, from the more obvious perfumer (or ‘nose’) and wine critic to other professions such as doctors who rely on sensory information to make diagnoses. In order to learn more about their sensory education, I head into medical schools and look at how sensory lessons are designed. Also reflecting on my own medical student experiences, I focus on the way in which medical education of the senses requires explicit ‘set-ups’, arrangements which facilitate the sensory lesson. I look at the invisible labour of these set-ups – the care and maintenance of materials and settings. These are, I argue, tools and practices of calibration. I conclude, however, by suggesting that teaching sensory skills requires skills in improvising beyond the set-up.
