A lot of what this Practices of Looking book has offered so far has been insightful, intuitive, and educational to say the least about the visual world around us. I have learned about the ways in which advertising is both deceptive but also harmful to particular audiences. I now understand that social hierarchy is a theme used in many of the things we view in our every day life which are used to continuously establish a social inequality. I now see the way in which the westernized culture has used notions of the “other” in order to systematically conceptualize itself as a more important role within the world. But when the Practices of Looking used its rhetorical discourse to pick apart the field of medicine, I just had to disagree with the way in which it tried to infiltrate the biological sphere. It is undeniable that book about rhetoric is just as susceptible to being accused as having a particular bias as the rest of the media because it in and of itself is being rhetorical about rhetoric. So, in order to have a conversation about something that is, not probably, but is more objective than the media, the discourse that needed to be used about medicine would have to carry the same conversational tone. In the chapter, the writers go on to discuss the problems with the scientific and medical field using

“The idea of the image or the imaging instrument as that which helps us see more, better or further than the human eye continues to be a ‘theme’ in scientific discourse in the twenty-first century.” I’m sorry but I find this passage completely ridiculous to assume that the medical field using more modes of visual identification for illness and patient care is some sort of way of “classifying people” that has very detrimental “cultural and social implications of imaging inside the body.”

I watched a commercial a few days ago about a product that G.E. is working on to allow doctors the ability to scan a human stomach and show a patient on a screen what the problems are and what is going on internally. For the writers of Practices of Looking, this would undoubtedly be categorized as an “implication” to which some how there would be a spin of blame placed back on the medical profession. Yet, one of the arguments made about this topic is that the medical field is set up in a hierarchy in which the person who is performing the procedure or inspection of the patient, AKA the Doctor, is placed on a hierarchal pedestal because they know terminology that the patient does not. So, my thought about this “problem” that the visual rhetoricians who have a problem with the “gaze” on the human body is this. If, the patient and doctor who are viewing an X-ray, or CAT- Scan, or this new technology that I mentioned by G.E. are viewing the results together, and the patient is being a part of the process of the diagnosis, then why is is problematic? I just find the debate that we went over in class about the visuals within the scientific field are relatively unimportant. We can argue back and forth over what the medical field may be trying to tell us by showing us an image of our intestinal cancer on a screen, but when we really break it down to the basics of what is going on, it is simply the human condition trying to understand itself better through the most important sensory node through which is perceives information. And the authors of the book Practices of “Looking”, emphasis on the notion of sight, I believe should have thought a little bit harder about before creating their claim about this particular topic.