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Short abstract:

Human patient simulations visualize and virtualize medical touch. Through an archival study on the early models of human patient simulation, this project brings forward a discussion on the empathic and caring aspect of haptic perception these simulations render.

Long abstract:

Practicing medicine has always been a tactile experience: physicians palpate the surface to diagnose, radiologists trace the internal structure on an X-ray photograph, and surgeons’ hands rummage through or graft back organs. In a closer look, it is a desperate attempt to grasp seemingly ungraspable things – a symptom, illness, internal systems that are invisible to the eye but can be visible through this haptic experience. This is best exemplified by recent developments in medical simulation where medical touch is delegated virtually. However virtual this touch may be, doctors still care for their patients – those virtual and hypothetical figures facing them now and in the future - through their touch. Through an archival study on early models of human patient simulation from the 1960s to 1980s - namely, 1) Resusci-Anne (1960), 2) Sim One (1967), and 3) CASE (1986) - this project purports to bring forward a discussion on the caring aspect of haptic perception these simulations render. Drawing from the aesthetics of haptic perception by Riegl, Merleau-Ponty, and Vischer, this paper argues that the experience of kinesthetic attunement, haptic visual perception, and empathetic imagination through the medical simulation construct a haptic perceptive realism that enforces ethical limits of operational practice. Situating this development in its historical context, where these simulations were developed in tandem with the adoption of patient rights and standardized patients, this paper puts forward a broader argument that this haptic experience of care is a corporealization of an empathic self in the medical experience.