IMAGES AND ICONS

Modern images have became essential to our daily work because they pro vide high quality representations which, with admittedly some difficul ties and pitfalls, allow detection and diagnosis of lesions and moreov er inspire and guide every step of surgery. This place and value of th e image as the main source of technical information required for the p atient's management is straightforward and raises no major epistemolog ical problem. However our use of images easily escapes critical thinki ng. Images may impose their own power and rationality. Medical images are powerful for the patient and for the doctor because they contain a n unlimited source of explanation for the disease, they make disease a nd functional complaints, comprehensible. They are important for the s urgeons because they offer an unique and irreplaceable guide to the le sions, they make it visible, they give shape and in fact reality to wh at in the patient, belongs to surgery. This power of medical images is irrefutable because, rather than mere representations, they are analo gical reflexions of the real body with its real lesions, there is an o ntological continuity between image and reality. For these and some ot her reasons we are tempted to give to images a consideration which sho uld be due only to the patient himself. This temptation is idolatrous in nature. Under a number of different aspects this tempation pervades the entire field of medicine and might ultimately narrow our vision o f patients, our vision of man.