New publication: Architecture for anatomy

Recently John published an article titled “Architecture for anatomy: history, affect, and the material reproduction of the body in two medical school buildings”. In the article John explores the history and material culture of medical education, focusing on the spaces where students come to know the anatomical bodies of their future patients.

In the article John writes that medical schools play a vital role in shaping the knowing bodies of future clinicians through a process of cognitive and embodied practice. However, these spaces are often under-theorized and under-historicized. John’s article seeks to address this by integrating ‘materialist’ considerations of the body with Henri Lefebvre’s philosophy of space and rhythm.

In the article two markedly different medical school spaces are compared, the 19th-century Anatomy Department at Semmelweis University in Hungary and the mid-20th-century ‘skills laboratory’ at Maastricht University in the Netherlands. Through this comparison, John argues that biomedical bodies are shaped by the agential and affective material histories present in the everyday experience of contemporary medical education.