As digital technologies are integrated into medical environments, they continue to transform the experience of contemporary health care. Importantly, medicine is increasingly visual. In the history of sonography, visibility has played an important role in accessing fetal bodies for diagnostic and entertainment purposes. With the advent of three-dimensional rendering, sonography presents the fetus visually as already a child. The aesthetics of this process and the resulting imagery, made possible in digital networks, discloses important changes in the relationship between technology and (...) biology, reproductive health and political debates, and biotechnology and culture. (shrink)

Twelve years after his famous Essay on Some Problems Concerning the Normal and the Pathological (1943), the philosopher Georges Canguilhem (1904–1995) published a book-length study on the history of a single biological concept. Within France, his Formation of the Reflex Concept in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries (1955) contributed significantly to defining the “French style” of writing on the history of science. Outside of France, the book passed largely unnoticed. This paper re-reads Canguilhem’s study of the reflex concept with respect (...) to its historiographical and epistemological implications. Canguilhem defines concepts as complex and dynamic entities combining terms, definitions, and phenomena. As a consequence, the historiography of science becomes a rather complex task. It has to take into account textual and contextual aspects that develop independently of individual authors. In addition, Canguilhem stresses the connection between conceptual activities and other functions of organic individuals in their respective environments. As a result, biological concepts become tied to a biology of conceptual thinking, analogical reasoning, and technological practice. The paper argues that this seemingly circular structure is a major feature in Canguilhem’s philosophical approach to the history of the biological sciences. (shrink)

The claim that mind is an epiphenomenon of the nervous system became academically respectable during the 19thcentury. The same period saw the establishment of an ideal of science as institutionalized endeavour conducted in laboratories. This article identifies three ways in which the ‘physiological psychology’ movement in Britain contributed to the latter process: first, via an appeal to the authority of difficult-to-access sites in the analysis of nerves; second, through the constitution of a discourse internal to it that privileged epistemology over (...) ontology; and third, in its articulation of a set of rhetorical tools that identified laboratories as economically productive institutions. Acknowledging the integral place of physiological psychology in the institution of science, it is claimed, has the potential to alter our understanding of the significance of current neurological science for historical scholarship. (shrink)

ArgumentDiscussions of the scientific uses of moving-image technologies have emphasized applications that culminated in static images, such as the chronophotographic decomposition of movement into discrete and measurable instants. The projection of movement, however, was also an important capability of moving-image technologies that scientists employed in a variety of ways. Views through the microscope provide a particularly sustained and prominent instance of the scientific uses of the moving image. The category of “education” subsumes theses various scientific uses, providing a means by (...) which to bridge the cultures of scientific and popular scientific moving images. (shrink)

The article analyses the role of time in the visual culture of two phases in embryological research: at the end of the nineteenth century, and in the years around 2000. The first case study involves microscopical cytology, the second reproductive genetics. In the 1870s we observe the first of a series of abstractions in research methodology on conception and development, moving from a method propagated as the observation of the “real” living object to the production of stained and fixated objects (...) that are then aligned in temporal order. This process of abstraction ultimately fosters a dissociation between space and time in the research phenomenon, which after 2000 is problematized and explicitly tackled in embryology. Mass data computing made it possible partially to re-include temporal complexity in reproductive genetics in certain, though not all, fields of reproductive genetics. Here research question, instrument and modelling interact in ways that produce very different temporal relationships. Specifically, this article suggests that the different techniques in the late nineteenth century and around 2000 were employed in order to align the time of the researcher with that of the phenomenon and to economize the researcher’s work in interaction with the research material’s own temporal challenges. (shrink)

ArgumentNineteenth-century Prussia was deeply entrenched in philhellenism, which affected the ideological framework of its public institutions. At Berlin’s Friedrich Wilhelm University, philhellenism provided the rationale for a persistent elevation of the humanities over the burgeoning experimental life sciences. Despite this outspoken hierarchy, professor of physiology Emil du Bois-Reymond eventually managed to increase the prestige of his discipline considerably. We argue that du Bois-Reymond’s use of philhellenic repertoires in his expositions on physiology for the educated German public contributed to the rise (...) of physiology as a renowned scientific discipline. Du Bois-Reymond’s rhetorical strategies helped to disassociate experimental physiology from clinical medicine, legitimize experimental practices, and associate the emerging discipline with the more esteemed humanities and theoretical sciences. His appropriation of philhellenic rhetoric thus spurred the late nineteenth-century change in disciplinary hierarchies and helped to pave the way for the current hegemonic position of the life sciences. (shrink)