Learning how to see: doctors making judgements in the visual domain

Abstract

Initial results are presented from an ongoing, work‐based collaborative inquiry between three medical consultants (a pathologist, a radiologist and a dermatologist) and three experienced visual artists into processes of clinical and aesthetic judgements in the visual domain. The doctors’ habitual conventions are challenged through the interventions of the artists, leading to a re‐education of the senses through a revitalised clinical imagination. Outcomes include self‐assessed improvement of clinical acumen through systematic review of the clinical reasoning process looking specifically at the aesthetic dimension. A central research interest is how forms and styles of judgement construct identities of the expert practitioner in work settings. The papers describes a change in practice from “looking” to “seeing” as the development of a “connoisseurship” of informational images informed by tolerance of ambiguity, creating a practice identity against the grain of the normative technical‐rational discourse of clinical reasoning.

Citation

Bleakley, A., Farrow, R., Gould, D. and Marshall, R. (2003), "Learning how to see: doctors making judgements in the visual domain", Journal of Workplace Learning, Vol. 15 No. 7/8, pp. 301-306. https://doi.org/10.1108/13665620310504765