Skills, Scalpels and Robots: The Surgeon as Technician

Abstract

According to Aristotle, medical practice relies on practical knowledge to care for individual patients. This is especially true for surgery, where the surgeon directly acts on a patient using not only technical skills but also acquired experience. We first describe the surgeon’s technical activity, which is directly linked to surgical tools and their historical evolution. Second, given that surgical activity aims at treating patients, we analyze which techniques and concurrent knowledge the surgeon must rely on to perform successful surgical operations. These characteristics are analyzed by using concepts from philosophy of technologies by André Leroi-Gourhan, Gilbert Simondon and John Dewey.

Dealing with the Machine: Strategies of Pilots and Doctors Towards Technological Integration

“…Nevertheless, the question of deskilling seems to be a multifaceted prism, which generates a variety of dialectical relations. While some researchers argue that technology-driven practice of medicine can inflict, as in academic work (Ovetz, 2020), a change in once-acquired professional human skills, especially in surgery, transforming the surgeon into a technician (Del Fabbro & Muller, 2021), and the operating room into a technology-dominated field (Saunders et al, 2016), promoting enhancement of situational awareness (Green et al, 2017), some others underline the importance of algorithmic reorganization of the practice around technology (Hartland, 1993). Research have been carried out on the adaptation of healthcare workers, as well as their resistance to robotics (Barrett et al, 2012;Uslu et al, 2019).…”