[The medical biologist "under the microscope": Analysis of digital images depicting laboratory medicine]

In France, the practice of laboratory medicine has, over the past ten years or so, met with a certain amount of disenchantment from medical students. Despite its intricacy and importance to healthcare, the world of the clinical laboratory lacks visibility in medical studies. While other phenomena can explain this disenchantment, our belief in the importance of promoting greater visibility of laboratory medicine in medical studies led us to examine for this article the images and symbols associated with the profession, based on a semiotic analysis. We created a collection of digital images published over the last ten years and found that these images, aside from a few outliers, offer a fairly reasonable representation of the analytical dimension of laboratory medicine. However, we found that this collection of images does not reflect the wealth of specialities, technological complexity and other important aspects of the practice of laboratory medicine especially regarding the clinical staff. Furthermore, we found that clinical interactions (i.e., interactions with patients or doctors) remain, with a few exceptions, absent from most of the images, raising questions about the impact of the images on medical students' perceptions of the profession.