Friction Has Not Disappeared

In 1987, a surgeon in Lyon, France, performed one of the first laparoscopic cholecystectomies: a gallbladder removal using a camera and instruments inserted through tiny incisions rather than traditional open surgery.

The open surgeons were horrified. Not because the procedure was dangerous, but because it violated something they held sacred: the tactile relationship between the surgeon's hand and the patient's body. In open surgery, you felt the tissue. You knew through the resistance of your fingers where the gallbladder ended and the liver began. The friction of your hands in the body cavity was not an obstacle. It was your primary source of information.

They were partly right. Something real was lost. Surgeons trained exclusively on laparoscopic techniques do not develop the same tactile intuition as open surgeons. The embodied knowledge that comes from hands inside a body, feeling the difference between healthy tissue and diseased tissue, navigating by touch