UC San Diego

This dissertation outlines the visual knowledge of the human body produced by emerging technologies in the history of medical science and the idea of the body they present. Medical images do not merely replicate a preexisting human body; they actively construct what I name here the medical body, a presentation that organizes how the body is to be seen, felt, interpreted, and inhabited within the epistemic, practical, and affective frameworks of medical science. Contributing to scholarship on the visual knowledge of science, medicine, and technology, this dissertation seeks to expand this scholarship by examining the sensual human interactions that medical images forge: how do humans feel and care for the body through these images? This project looks at how human connection with the medical body - not just how we see the body but how we live with the body - is mediated by images. The constant (re)organization of this connection through images is foundational to the visual culture of medical science in modern medicine. In this dissertation, I provide an overview of the development of the technological vision of medical science at the interfaces of photography, human patient simulators, and virtual reality. Tracing the development of techno-aesthetic configurations of the medical body and the distinct feelings each interface encourages, I find that each interface promotes a particular sensual mode of perception and communication: empathy, haptic vision, and affect. I illustrate how these visual configurations are indirect results of sociocultural and ethical influences of the time, conditioned by technical affordances. The images are distorted and reconfigured presentations of the body imagined under these influences, producing their own effects. Each of these images, which become canonical images of the interface, produces a permutation of the medical body, conventional to the interface, that evokes a corresponding caring spectatorship in the audience. As a result, I illuminate how the images cultivate and modulate the conditions of possibility for medical science—its entities, practices, cultures, ethics, and affects—with this potentiality finding expression in the primordial and caring communication of the medical image. An image of medical science is thus an image of care and an image that cares; it is an articulation, initiation, expression, and communication of care. It is a caring image.