Images and icons.

Modern images have became essential to our daily work because they provide high quality representations which, with admittedly some difficulties and pitfalls, allow detection and diagnosis of lesions and moreover inspire and guide every step of surgery. This place and value of the image as the main source of technical information required for the patient's management is straightforward and raises no major epistemological problem. However our use of images easily escapes critical thinking. Images may impose their own power and rationality. Medical images are powerful for the patient and for the doctor because they contain an unlimited source of explanation for the disease, they make disease and functional complaints, comprehensible. They are important for the surgeons because they offer an unique and irreplaceable guide to the lesions, they make it visible, they give shape and in fact reality to what in the patient, belongs to surgery. This power of medical images is irrefutable because, rather than mere representations, they are analogical reflexions of the real body with its real lesions, there is an ontological continuity between image and reality. For these and some other reasons we are tempted to give to images a consideration which should be due only to the patient himself. This temptation is idolatrous in nature. Under a number of different aspects this temptation pervades the entire field of medicine and might ultimately narrow our vision of patients, our vision of man.