Upcoming Conferences in Social Studies of Science/Medicine: Fall 2015

Posted by jknopes

If you have an event to add to this list, please contact Julia Balacko at jcb193@case.edu with the name of the event/conference, date(s), location, and a link to the event page or a brief description. This list is for conference in the Fall of 2015 (August-December.) All conferences/events are organized chronologically by date.

Seventh International Conference on Science in Society: “Educating Science”

October 1-2 2015 – Chicago, Illinois

http://science-society.com/the-conference/call-for-papers

A Critical Moment: Sex/Gender Research at the Intersection of Culture, Brain, & Behavior Conference

October 23-24 2015 – Los Angeles, California

http://www.thefprconference2015.org/

Society for Social Studies of Science (4S) Annual Meeting

November 11-14 2015 – Denver, Colorado

http://www.4sonline.org/meeting

American Anthropological Association 2015 Annual Meeting: “Familiar/Strange”

November 18-22 2015 – Denver, Colorado

http://www.aaanet.org/meetings/

Logo via AAA website

History of Science Society Annual Meeting

November 19-22 – San Francisco, California

http://hssonline.org/meetings/annual-meeting-archive/

“Making” Anatomical Bodies: T. Kenny Fountain’s Rhetoric in the Flesh

Posted by jknopes

Recently, I had the pleasure of attending the book launch for T. Kenny Fountain’s Rhetoric in the Flesh: Trained Vision, Technical Expertise, and the Gross Anatomy Lab. At the event, Fountain discussed some of the key arguments from the book, and shared anecdotes from his participant observation in the human gross anatomy lab.

Book cover via ATTW

Fountain’s text is an ethnographic account penned from the perspective of a rhetorician of science communication. His focus on language offers a lens into anatomical learning and clinical training that is at once pointed and engrossing. Through his account, Fountain reveals the underlying relationships and tensions between students of anatomy and the bodies they dissect.

As I learned from the book launch talk and from an initial reading of the text, one term that Fountain’s participants in the laboratory frequently returned to was “making.” This word appears counterintuitive, given that dissection entails acts that are more closely associated with destruction than creation: scraping fat from tissues, disarticulating bones, removing organs to see structures beneath of them. However, “making” meant something quite particular to those who carried out dissections.

Students, instructors, and teaching assistants in the cadaver laboratories employed “making” to describe cutting and preparing the corpse in ways that would mimic the beautifully colored, flawlessly sketched anatomical drawings in their medical atlases. To dissect a body in a careful fashion that would reveal biological structures as cleanly and as clearly as the textbooks was to “make” the body, both into a mimicry of the visuals in the textbooks, and into a body that was representative of what the books deemed anatomical truth. Some students alternatively deemed this process “Netterizing,” or rendering their cadaver’s anatomy to appear as manifestly as the eminent anatomical artist and physician Frank Netter did in his illustrations.

Yet bodies can be “made” by more than the students and faculty alone. Fountain’s text also argues that bodies can make themselves. In one case, a woman who donated her body to science accompanied her anatomical gift with a letter. The letter contained details of the domestic abuse she suffered, as she explained the scars medical students would discover on her skin when they began to dissect her. The woman cast her body in a context that the students who received her body, and read her correspondence, could not ignore when considering the conditions under which that body lived and died. This woman “made” her body a representation of its life, its embodied struggles, and its significance as a precious gift to the students who received it.

Cadavers can also “make” themselves in death. One cadaver in the laboratory Fountain observed at had late-stage cancer that had not been reported on her medical records before she was embalmed for dissection. The cancerous tissue was stiff and impossible to cut through. It obscured structures, encased organs, and halted the dissection. In this instance, the cadaver makes itself both anomalous– by not representing “true” anatomical structures like the textbooks– and simultaneously representative of the reality of disease, which medical students will confront as future physicians.

For linguistic and medical anthropologists alike, as well as all humanistic scholars of medicine, Fountain’s book presents fresh analysis on an age-old tradition of medical learning: anatomical dissection. By attending closely to the language used to describe bodies, the language used by donors to describe their own bodies, and to the visual displays that mediate experience in anatomical learning, Fountain provides an innovative account that blends science and technology studies, visual studies, and rhetorical research.

You can learn more about and purchase Rhetoric in the Flesh here:

http://www.attw.org/publications/book-series/rhetoric-in-the-flesh

A similar version of this post appears at the Dittrick Museum blog, which you may find here:

http://dittrickmuseumblog.com/

Book Release: Haeckel’s Embryos by Nick Hopwood

Posted by jknopes

Debuting May 2015 from the University of Chicago Press is Nick Hopwood’s Haeckel’s Embryos: Images, Evolution, and Fraud. The book describes the lasting cultural impact of 19th-century illustrations that demonstrate the identical appearance of human and other vertebrate embryos in the earliest stages of gestation, only later morphing into their adult-like forms. These drawings, produced by Darwinist Ernst Haeckel in 1868, caused an uproar in the scientific community at the time as well as in the 1990s, when biologists and creationists alike argued against their accuracy and inclusion into scientific textbooks.

Image courtesy University of Chicago Press

Hopwood traces the heated history of Haeckel’s drawings from their initial publication in the 19th century through their controversial presence in the current age. In addition to considering the impact of these images on developing understandings of biology, Haeckel simultaneously draws attention to the continued power of these images in contemporary discourse. The book will prove of interest to scholars of medicine who are curious about how popular as well as scientific knowledge of the human body is shaped by visual media, as well as how scientific information is culturally and historically situated.

Nick Hopwood is Reader in History of Science and Medicine and the Director of Graduate Studies at the University of Cambridge’s Department of History and Philosophy of Science.

To learn more about the book, check out its feature page at UCP here: http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/H/bo18785800.html

From the Archive: Biotechnology and the Culture of Medicine

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In the “From the Archive” series, we highlight articles published throughout the journal’s history. We look forward to sharing with our readers these samples of the innovative research that CMP has published on the cultural life of medicine across the globe.

In this installment of From the Archive, we turn to Mary-Jo Delvecchio Good’s article The Biotechnical Embrace (Vol 25 Issue 4, December 2001.) In this piece, Delvecchio Good frames three concepts in the cultural study of biomedicine: medical imaginaries, biotechnical embraces, and clinical narratives. Here, we will briefly outline these notions.

The medical imaginary, we learn, is the envisioned potential of the new technologies and treatments that medicine could produce in the future. The power of possibility in this sense impacts both clinicians, who are always working to stay ahead of new scientific knowledge, and patients: often those afflicted with diseases for which no current remedy exists. The medical imaginary situates medical progress in a position of hope and opportunity. Stories of medical failure, malpractice, or dearths of medical knowledge, although evidence contrary to establishing an “optimistic” view of the field, are framed in an overarching positive narrative of scientific progress.

Delvecchio Good next describes the biotechnical embrace: the embracing of, and the “being embraced” by technical innovations. This refers to the public “enthusiasm” for biotechnical therapies, as well as the engagement of biotechnologies with the patient’s body. Like the medical imaginary, the biotechnical embrace concept recalls a biomedical commitment to scientific progress and possibility. Even whenever a treatment is highly experimental, not yet approved as effective, or so new that its pitfalls are not fully known, patients will ’embrace’ and request it– and the public will hastily invest in it.

Lastly, we parse the concept of the clinical narrative, or ethnographic frame. This qualitative data is what evidences popular and clinical enthusiasm for bioscientific innovation and the use of the latest technological treatments.

Put simply, narratives can demonstrate that patients and clinicians alike are able to frame care in terms of the gap between what is presently the case, and what might be. For instance, a cancer patient might note the gaps between their condition, current treatments they have used, future therapeutic options, and subsequent clinical outcomes for his or her illness. Clinical narratives remind us that patients (and caregivers) do not view medicine as a static database of information, but instead a dynamic and progressive body of knowledge that exists in relation to illness experiences.

Click here for a link to the abstract and further details about the paper: http://link.springer.com/article/10.1023/A%3A1013097002487

AAA 2014: Perspectives on the Bruno Latour Distinguished Lecture

Posted by jknopes

This year at the American Anthropological Association 2014 Meeting, Bruno Latour was invited to deliver the distinguished lecture. Entitled “Anthropology at the Time of the Anthropocene,” Latour discusses the rise in the term anthropocene to describe our current stage of natural history. Although the term makes reference to how “human” (anthro) our current age may be, Latour jests that this term was introduced by geologists, not social scientists. In the anthropocene, it is humans that play the defining role in our geological historical moment.

The assumption, Latour notes, is that human agency is the prime source of action that shapes the physical world. Humans are responsible for climate change, for pollution, for altering the literal, natural fabric of our world. Yet we know that not all humans have the same impact on our environment. As Latour quips, there is not “One Human” who is responsible for the changes we see in our climate or environment. We are simultaneously assessing human power as a plural, collective entity, as well as using this concept to suggest that the blame for global change does not fall evenly across all humans. As anthropologists and cultural theorists, we know how fragile human agency can be when we divide it amongst many contending social and cultural groups.

Our blog editor at the Latour Distinguished Lecture

Is there another way to think about human action that does not problematically configure humans as both collective and individual, acting but not universally accountable for all human actions? Latour posits that rather than focusing solely on agency, with a strong emphasis on human intention and purpose when committing action, we could think instead about animation, or what forces–human and non-human– are in motion in a given social space. To do so, we can no longer assume that the human agent is a colloquial be-all-end-all.

How does this assertion speak to medical anthropology, social medicine, and medical humanities? At first, we might raise our brows at the discussions of geography, environment, and most of all the suspicion surrounding the primacy of human agency. Decentralizing the human agent, we might say, is perhaps the least humanistic approach to the study of human experience. Indeed, medicine is the care of humans by humans!

However, our human ability to question our own power and position in the universe, amidst other natural and non-human forces, is a mark of our species. Whether through philosophy, religion, or social science, humans have a proclivity for ruminating about our place in the material, corporal world. We crave knowledge about what sets us apart from non-human things, and how we are sometimes reliant on them. For scholars of medicine, such inquiries about our relationships with the physical universe is key. We consider the place of non-human agents in disease and care. We ask: why do physicians rely on certain tools? Why do patients see stethoscopes, thermometers, and scalpels as making a clinician legitimate in his or her practice? How are medical traditions made unique by their tools and pharmaceutical formulas? Could the layout of a hospital or clinic itself alter the way care is given?

In an age where technology permeates developed and developing societies, Latour’s suggestion to destabilize human agency is productive when considering medicine as a cultural object. We must think not only of ourselves, but the physical environments we live in and the material objects and devices we cannot seem to live without.

Many scholars understandably resist Latour’s idea that non-humans could have some primitive agency. Yet even if we do not assign agency to non-human tools, things, and environments, thinking seriously about their role in sociocultural systems is informative. Medicine is a lively site of exchange between patients and physicians, as well as practitioners and devices, patients and new medical innovations, and the built environments which house them. As Latour invites us to do, we should pause to consider humans within the midst of a rich material world around us that– like humanity itself– is constantly in motion.

Julia Balacko is a second-year PhD student in medical anthropology at Case Western Reserve University. She holds an MA in Humanities from the University of Chicago. Her research focuses on the culture of human anatomy and dissection in Western medical traditions, as well as public access to anatomical and pathological specimens.

Note on the presenter:

Bruno Latour is professor at the Sciences Po Paris in Paris, France. A central theorist in STS (science and technology studies), he is the author of We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Science in Action (1987) and Laboratory Life (1979).

You can read the full text of Latour’s lecture here: http://www.bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/139-AAA-Washington.pdf