This paper presents an ethnographic study of medical formation in a school in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, with special attention to the use of images in teaching. This showed how practical dispositions that guide practice in the medical field are ingrained into the students. The study demonstrated that academic practices still reproduce the structuring relationships of the medical field, while the involved agents cannot have a conscious control of this process, whether for transforming it or making it more effective.
Ethnography; medical education; academic practices