Sometimes in medicine it is hard to see what you want to examine. Sometimes it is even hard to feel what you want to touch. The female reproductive tract is an example of anatomical structures that can be hard to examine with the bare eyes and even the bare hands. It can be hard to see them, feel them, examine them to determine their shape, their size, if they have growths in or on them, if they are healthy or diseased. A doctor’s fingers and hands can approach them, and other technologies—like ultrasound wands and various scans—can be used to create images of the parts to complement the tactile impressions the doctor collects during a manual examination. But knowing what they are, knowing them, is a complex practice.

What this chapter considers is how the patient body is a knowledge phenomenon emerging within the medical practices used to examine it and through the technologies used to model it.