Living into the imagined body: how the diagnostic image confronts the lived body (original) (raw)

ICONOGRAPHIES OF EMBODIMENT AT INTERSECTIONS OF MEDICINE AND ART

etd.ceu.hu

This work traces certain intersections of medicine and art to argue that an understanding of embodiment is always articulated at the nexuses of different practices. It starts out from a consideration of visuality as central to the modern medical paradigm, enhanced by technological modes of looking from the 19 th century onwards. The thesis considers photographic imaging, clinical medicine, and eugenics in conjunction to highlight some characteristic aspects of the late-19 th -century understanding of corporeality. It then proceeds to consider medical imaging technologies and links them to certain desires that were also at work in the photographs analyzed in the first chapter. Furthermore, contemporary art pieces are introduced in the last section to underline the ways in which the dividing lines between artistic and scientific epistemology have been subjects to constant change. The thesis ends with a consideration of contemporary artistic practices and biosocial identity formations in creating a new, experimental public around a medical interpretation of embodiment.

The Epic Anatomy of the Body. New Historical-Humanistic Approaches to the Medical Image

Codrul Cosminului, 2022

In current historiography, the interdisciplinary study of history, visual arts, and medicine is no longer a novelty. The last decades have brought challenging works to the attention of researchers, highlighting, in particular, affinities between the three fields. Offering a different dimension to medical problems and overcoming chronological, geographical and disciplinary limitations, such books and studies broaden the horizon of knowledge, revealing the effects of medicine on society from multiple perspectives: cultural, political, economic, religious and intellectual. As the innovation in medicine is increasingly accelerated, and the results of scientific research in the field of biomedicine are challenging (often generating ethical debates and moral dilemmas), works like Anatomy of the Medical Image: Knowledge Production and Transfiguration from the Renaissance to Today offers the opportunity to assess the changing role of medical practices over “longue durée” of history. They contribute to a better understanding of the past and a more profound and fuller interrogation of the present. The thirteen contributions in the volume edited by Brill under the auspices of the Clio Medica series show how the historical approach, the visual material and the medical subject can work together

Ambiguity, the disembodied self, and the performative How medical imaging techniques inform embodied art-work Introduction

Ambiguity, the disembodied self, and the performative, 2019

The human body is at risk to be disciplined and normalised through the medical gaze. Medical technologies are mapping devices and often considered as objective measures versus an unreliable, perceiving, non-conforming body1. Therefore, the body had to be disciplined as much as the images produced by the instruments. This essay will look at medical imagery as media culture, it's appeal to artists, and how it may challenge an embodied self when being exposed to the gaze. By placing this essay in context of art, I will review works of Helen Chadwick and how her residency at King's College informed her practice. My own MRI experience will be the base to question how screen-based imagery may challenge our perception of the body and how performative aspects of MRI inform a posthuman body image. My own practice is a visual reflection of this interrogation. This review will eventually challenge notions of objectivity and stability. Through an expanded perceptual space art can create aesthetic responses beyond conventional patterns of knowledge.

Visualising Bodies Within and Beyond Laboratories and Clinics

Tecnoscienza Italian Journal of Science Technology Studies, 2014

As a response to the spread of biomedical imaging, this conversation explores crucial aspects related to the production, interpretation and use of body images within and beyond laboratories and clinics. Regula Valérie Burri's contribution raises questions about the implications of medical imaging technologies and practices for both medical treatments and patients' identities. Annamaria Carusi explores the intertwined epistemic and ontological roles of visualizations in the field of personalized medicine within two contexts of mediation: that of basic research and biomedical application; and and that of biomedical research and health care systems. Finally, Aikaterini A. Aspradaki discusses the use of body images from a bioethics perspective, focusing on the autonomy of persons and the ethical, economic, legal and social issues raised by the visualizations of bodies.

Remediating Anatomical Images of the Human Body, En-gendering Anatomical Iconicity

It has been noticed of late that anatomical representations in any medium have always claimed to depict the actual, living human body in realistic visual terms. Nonetheless, realism is anything but objective -itself a deeply problematic concept -or value-free. Like in the arts, realism in anatomy is a technique which disavows its epistemic condition by conventional fiat, and traditionally convincingly so. Furthermore, both "realist" anatomical sketches past and present and state-of-theart medical simulators do not so much contribute to the advancement (and dissemination) of body knowledge as they represent, reproduce and thus tacitly reinforce societal values and understandings as framed within the anatomo-medical discipline. This paper investigates ways in which practices of anatomical representation past and present, in particular the La Specola ceroplastics (as remediated in the Encyclopedia Anatomica's photographs) and contemporary anatomy books, can yield metacognitive insights into western epistemology via the anatomo-medical sciences. The broad feminist framework I have adopted enables a critique of scientific discursive practices, with their engendering of situated knowledges deemed, however, universal and thereby rendered iconic.

Re-enchanting the body: overcoming the melancholy of anatomy

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 2018

I argue here that Weberian disenchantment is manifest in the triumph of instrumental reason and the expansion of analytic enquiry, which now dominates not simply those sciences upon which medicine depends, but medical practice itself. I suggest ways that analytic enquiry, also referred to here as anatomical reasoning, are part of a particular ideology-a way of seeing, speaking about, and inhabiting the world-that often fails to serve the health of patients because it is incapable of "seeing" them in the moral sense described by Iris Murdoch and others. I use the work of James Elkins and Wendell Berry to call for the recovery of a way of seeing the human body as both other and more than an object of scientific enquiry and social control.