Today, medical students practice their dissecting, stitching and carving skills on highly advanced materials and protheses. In the past, they had to work with simpler materials. In this context, fruit was both practically and metaphorically essential: oranges were used to learn how to inject and a peach served as a substitute of children’s skin. Marres director Valentijn Byvanck speaks with physician-anthropologist Anna Harris, surgeon Bart Schrier and artist Kaisu Koski, about how working with fruit might provide new insights into surgical practice. In turn, by attending closely to the fruit’s sensory qualities, we may discover comparative vocabularies that doctors might never have thought of before.

TRAINING THE SENSES

Knowledge is not only acquired visually at schools through language and text books. Learning involves all of our senses: we learn by listening, tasting, smelling, touching – and even by using our intuition. In the Training the Senses program, participants explore and discover a new vocabulary for their senses and a new way to transmit experience and acquire knowledge. Training the Senses is an ongoing series of workshops by Marres since 2016. The podcast conversations (since 2022) are moderated by Valentijn Byvanck, director of Marres.

For more information about Training the Senses and upcoming events check the Marres website. For more info on this particular workshop click here.

ABOUT ANNA HARRIS

Before working as an anthropologist and looking at medical practice from an ethnographic point of view, Anna Harris worked as a physician in Australia and the United Kingdom. In that clinical, academic world, she lacked the hands-on mentality. Her work strives to find creative and practical methods for exploring topics such as embodiment and materiality. She is currently working at Maastricht University with a team of anthropologists and historians on the Making Clinical Sense project, which is subsidized by the European Research Council.

ABOUT KAISU KOSKI

Kaisu Koski is an interdisciplinary artist and researcher with a background in media art and performance. She is Professor of Art and Design at Lab4Living at Sheffield Hallam University. In her work she explores themes such as climate crisis, human-nonhuman relations and empathy. She conducted research at various medical faculties and made films for medical education programs. Her work has been shown and performed in multiple galery shows and theaters and received awards on the film festival circuit.

ABOUT BART SCHRIER

Bart Schrier studied medicine in Groningen. After his military service, he started training as a urologist at the Isala clinics in Zwolle and the Radboud University Medical Center in Nijmegen and studied surgery for two years at the Canisius Wilhelmina Hospital in Nijmegen. After graduating, he went to work at the Jeroen Bosch Hospital in Den Bosch. He obtained his doctorate for bladder cancer and was named the best urologist in the Netherlands several times. He provides training for operations at home and abroad and supervises medical specialists during robotic operations.