Medical Practices and Embodied Knowledge
Summary
Medical practice integrates formal scientific understanding with the tacit, sensory and motor skills that practitioners develop through hands-on experience. Embodied knowledge refers to the ways in which the body itself becomes a vessel for clinical know-how, from the calibrated touch of a surgeon’s finger to the subtle sensory cues a nurse detects in a patient’s breathing. These competencies are honed through iterative training and shaped by emotional labour, cultural norms and material environments. The interplay between theoretical frameworks and lived bodily engagement underpins decision-making, patient interaction and professional identity. Recognising embodied knowledge highlights how expertise resides not only in texts and guidelines but within practitioners’ kinaesthetic memory, perceptual attunement and affective responses. This perspective has global significance, informing efforts to improve medical education, enhance patient safety and foster empathetic care across diverse settings.
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Medical Practices and Embodied Knowledge publication trend
The graph below shows the total number of articles in medical practices and embodied knowledge across all publications each year (not limited to Nature Index journals).
Technical terms
Embodied knowledge: Tacit understanding and skills internalised through bodily practice rather than explicit instruction.
Metric work: The coordinated sensory and numerical processes by which practitioners measure and interpret bodily data.
Affective material history: The emotional and sensory significance of educational spaces and artefacts that shape learning.
Medical citizenship: The set of moral, social and professional responsibilities that health workers enact within a national or cultural framework.
Sensory calibration: The alignment of practitioners’ perceptual faculties with standardised clinical measurements and instruments.
References
- Making Measuring Bodies. Science Technology & Human Values (2021).
- Architecture for Anatomy: History, Affect, and the Material Reproduction of the Body in Two Medical School Buildings. Body & Society (2023).
- Compassion or Corruption? Temporalities of Care and Nationhood in Papua New Guinean Nursing Education. Medical Anthropology Quarterly (2022).
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