The article analyzes two types of practice involved in medical training - case presentations and the annotation of consultations in medical records - that play a fundamental role in divesting patients of their personal qualities and reconstituting them as an objective body, a set of organs, the site of a lesion and the object of intervention. The ethnographic material presented here is the result of observing case presentations made by students to their tutors in a cardiology outpatient clinic at the University Hospital of UFBA. The article highlights the role of scientific and technological conceptions in this process. It also shows that both the case presentations to tutors (a descriptive and performative type of speech) and the written notes in medical records (a training practice that both shapes speech and reflects it, thereby authorizing the student) are procedures for objectifying the patient that depend on interpretation, although this takes place in surreptitious form.
Medical training; Biome-dicine; Body; Objectification; Medical practice