A crowded family photo (cover image). Rather a strange one though. People are nowhere to be seen as men replaced by specimen and each are clothed in jars.[1] The photo comes from a medical album that documents the surgical achievements in Haseki Nisa Hastanesi [Haseki Women’s Hospital] in Istanbul during the 1890s. The jars contain…
Category: Science, Technology and Medicine
My Pineal Prosthetic: Light Therapy and the Politics of Productivity
Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of the spectrum…Their engineers are sun-worshipers mediating a new scientific revolution associated with the night dream of post-industrial society. –Donna Haraway, “A Manifesto for Cyborgs” I frequent a park near my apartment…
It Takes a Village to Heal the Doctor: How the Humanities Helped Me Reclaim Idealism in Practicing Medicine
On the phone with a close friend I vented about a homeless patient of mine who had a stigmatizing health history and whose documentation overflowed with pejorative language; scanning through the notes as I prepared for my palliative care consultation, I counted “noncompliant” six times in just one paragraph from one specialist. The term “noncompliant,”…
X-ray Retouched: Medical Visualities in Barbara Hammer’s Sanctus
Flesh and bone, bodily hair, tissues, liquids, skin and nerves. For the experimental filmmaker Barbara Hammer (1939-2019), a pioneer in the disruption of heteronormative cinema, the body became a matter of experience and experiment throughout her life. As a person who dedicated her life to making “invisible bodies and histories visible” (Hammer 2010), Hammer attended…
Rationed Knowledge: Culture Films and Nutritional Propaganda in Wartime Japan
How was nutritional knowledge popularized on big screens in wartime Japan?
Opening the Japanese Body
How did Japanese people view organs and body? How do you view the inside of your body?
Views of Two Plagues
In 1744, an epizootic of cattle plague broke out in the Netherlands. This was the second such outbreak that the Netherlands experienced during the eighteenth century, the first having occurred from 1713 to 1720. This cattle disease was likely the virus known as rinderpest. Declared eradicated in 2011, rinderpest was a contagious morbillivirus affecting cows…
Mapping fever: disease archives in Ling Ma’s Severance and my class’s Google Earth project
Mapping Fever: Disease Archives in Ling Ma’s Severance and My Class’s Google Earth Project “The city was operating on a different kind of time,” observes Candace Chen, the protagonist of Ling Ma’s alarmingly prescient 2018 pandemic novel, Severance (248). During the devastating global spread of the fictional Shen Fever, Candace—immune to the disease—begins to take…
Harmful or Healthful? Medical Perspectives on Cannibalism in Early Modern Europe
When syphilis broke out in Europe during the late fifteenth century, people debated the disease’s origins. Many believed that it had arrived from the recently encountered “New World” (Eamon 2), but Bolognese surgeon Leonardo Fioravanti (1517-88) proposed that the outbreak was caused by cannibalism that had occurred during the French invasion of Naples in 1494….
The Healthy Exotic Taste of the Empire: A Story of Restyling Manchurian Food in Modern Japan
What is Manchurian Food? Here is a short story about what it was, and how it was restyled by zest and curiosity of nutrition scientists, urban consumers, and policymakers in prewar and wartime Japanese Empire (1930s-40s).