Book Review: Caring Visualities, or Visualizing Care in Fixing Images

“Koat phey khmaoch, châng moel’ (she is afraid of ghosts, so she wants to look), he said to me, not turning from his typing… The ward is not specialized in ghosts (there are other experts for those beings), yet doctors and nurses understood that patients might connect pain or a dream with a supernatural intervention…

Testing for Normalcy: Amniocentesis and Disability in the 1970s

John A. Carranza // “2. Pregnancy is usually a happy time. Most newborn infants are normal and healthy. Even so, parents often wonder if their unborn child will be normal.”[1] By the late 1970s, reproductive decisions and the sense of normality were challenged and redefined by the women’s liberation and disability rights movement, among others….

For the (EH) Record

Jennifer & April Edwell// Patient records have come a long way since the days of notes jotted in physician’s journals. In the bygone era of paper charting, physicians had to flip through files, deciphering scribbled numbers and words, hastily trying to (re)interpret the patient’s past. Medical residents hurried to capture patients’ ever-changing information and provide…

The Complicated History of the Visual Analog Scale: Part 1

Gabi Schaffzin // A few hours after knee surgery, a nurse or doctor might come into your room and ask how you’re feeling. They might show you a scale of 6 faces like this: Maybe a notched line like this: Or, they might show you this line. It will probably have two phrases on it:…

A Few Thoughts on EVE: Danger, Desire, and Reproductive Control

Livia Arndal Woods // The possibility of divorcing reproduction from the maternal body fascinates and haunts the human imagination. The dangers of and desire for such separation – for ectogenesis – has been of particular interest in science fiction. Indeed, the oxforddictionaries.com definition of ectogenesis reads: “(chiefly in science fiction) the development of embryos in…

Theorizing the Web, Theorizing the Body

Gabi Schaffzin // Towards the beginning of her talk at Theorizing the Web 2018, Alanna Reyes asks, “is it possible that we are perpetuating ides about our bodies and our technologies that we use by writing them into our real lives?” The scholar (a PhD in Science Studies & Communication at UC San Diego) goes…

Love in the Time of Science Fiction

Retrieved from WikiMedia Commons. Anna Fenton-Hathaway   “I think we’re gonna be surprised by how deeply emotional we’ll [be] . . . with the things that we’re gonna invent, coming soon, the robots and things like that, because we’re gonna program emotion into them. . . . [W]e’re not really ready for how much love…