Beyond reading and listening: how do we capture the impact of recent biomedical technology for museum collections
I just finished reading the contributions in Devices and Designs: Medical Technologies in Historical Perspective, collected by Julie Anderson and Carsten Timmermann, both at the Centre for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine at the University of Manchester. The articles present very interesting and carefully researched case stories, that testify to the continuing relevance and appeal of a technological perspective in the history of medicine.
I found the title slightly misleading, however. There is much text but very little materiality in the devices under study, and equally little consideration of their morphology or the aesthetics of design. Anderson and Timmermann are well aware of this, and they regret not having been able to present chapters that “illustrate the challenge of ‘reading’ non-textual sources” (p. 7).
This challenge is certainly a very real one. But the editors’ remark made me wonder whether identifying the challenge as one of making instruments and machines legible carries the risk of missing other important aspects of the role played by medical technologies, both in the clinic and in the laboratory. In these sites, technical equipment is felt, heard, smelt, and lived with, and imposes themselves on people in other ways than narrative and functional. This was very much the point made by Jan Eric Olsén and Thomas Söderqvist at last weeks Artefacts XII meeting in Oslo. And when studying the history and culture of medicine, or when collecting the recent biomedical heritage for museum collections, we should try to take this into account.
The problem, obviously, is how to do this. How are practices, bodily experiences, and embodiments brought in, either as objects of research or as museum objects? Tilly Tansey of The Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL, the driving force behind the invaluable series of witness seminars conducted by The History of Twentieth Century Medicine Group, is giving a talk at CHSTM in November on Busy Hands, Hidden Voices: Oral Histories of Medical Laboratory Technicians, which may point to possible ways forward.
Still, what is usually hidden about the manual work being performed in laboratories or elsewhere cannot necessarily be understood as a voice, and thereby as something that fits more easily with the historian’s idea of sources or of museum objects. But perhaps the oral (and eventually written) representation of a somatic experience is as close as we will get. Is there a way beyond representationalism if we wish to collect the aesthetic, somatic, and non-narrative aspects of medical tehnology?
27 Sep 2007 Søren
Some very interesting question indeed. I think the problem is a very general and very important one, and that it is ultimately tied to the subject position established for the critical academic historian of science and technology, which from the outset makes any extended engagement with materiality problematic.
The caveat that Anderson and Timmerman make in the introduction (particularly symptomatic is the bracketing of “reading”) is endemic in the current materiality-trend that we’ve seen in the past 5 years or so. From my own research on the history of the body, I have numerous examples of similar caveats – a paradigmatic example can be found in the introductions to Thomas Laqueur’s Making Sex, in which he writes that he is “saddened by the most obvious and persistent omission in this book: a sustained account of experience in the body.”
For some reason, this direct engagement with the experience of materiality is curiously often that which is regrettable omitted. I believe this happens to be the case because the engagement with materiality requires transgressing two unspoken boundaries of academic research: On the one hand it means opening academic language to a descriptive register which does not sit well with the idea/ideal of the distanced, critical third-person observer; on the other hand, it means accepting that our engagements with reality takes place on different levels which have different characteristics, not all ultimately reducible to an unbroken discursively structured field.
Materiality, then, potentially raises issues of what sort of knowledge we produce as academics, how we produce it, what it should be used for and what sort of questions it ultimately addresses. But this potential is not met if a direct engagement with materiality, however problematic, is simply bracketed off as a regrettable omission in an introductory essay.
I think you point to some very important and central elements of the problems encountered when we try to bring corporeality and materiality into our analyses. I light of what you are saying, the caveats could almost be seen as a kind of boundary-producing discursive act that removes the observer from the observed, thus producing the distance emblematic of scientific analysis. A strategy of legitimation, with the deeply problematic nature of any split between mind and body being glossed over by an assurance that the author would love to join the two, but is not able to do so.
Still, the caveats probably also indicate a real (and growing) ambition on the part of historians to bring non-discursive materiality into their work.