0.1.3: Specimen Studies

This dissertation looks at the ways biomedical scientists studied tuberculosis in the years following its microbial discovery. While there is a great deal of cultural and scientific baggage associated with the disease (0.1.2; 1.1.1), my interest is much more in the ways scientists constructed the disease from the bodies of patients. This project is more closely aligned with science and technology studies (STS), and its approach to the social construction of science—that is, scientific facts are the result of social processes, from access to materials and technologies to the ideological underpinnings which guide research.¹

My framework is indebted to Kim TallBear’s use of Stuart Hall. Writing of the coproduction of science in her book Native American DNA, she describes how biological phenomena are encoded in cultural processes. She writes,

Rather than being discrete categories where one determines the other in a linear model of cause and effect, ‘science’ and ‘society’ are mutually constitutive—meaning one loops back in to reinforce, shape or disrupt the actions of the other, although it should be understood that, because power is held unevenly, such multidirectional influences do not happen evenly.²

TallBear’s argument keys into how race and tribal identity are coded through DNA, pointing to how these discourses are a byproduct of the racial schemas assumed by the researchers studying Indigenous communities.³ Scientists coproduce a reality, and the racial ideologies, entangled as they are with modern medicine’s love of eugenics and racial science, maintain themselves. This is to say that because scientists at the turn of the twentieth century believed race to be a natural phenomenon, they looked for racial determinants of the phenomena they studied. In the case of tuberculosis, Black patients were assumed to be sick at higher rates than white patients because of a supposed racial inferiority, and not because the systems of health actively harmed Black subjects (1.3.5).⁴

My interest is in the covert ways ideas are made through the production of specimens. A media object, the specimen is any material or information that has been taken from someone or something and staged in a scientific context. I use the term ‘media object’ to refer to the representation processes encoded into scientific research materials. Object, which I will define in more detail in the next section (0.1.4), refers to something that has been stripped of its original context in such a way as to make it representative for a knowledge claim. Importantly for human contexts, a research object is produced through a process of objectification—which strips certain historical, cultural, personal connections from the research material. A patient is a research subject, and the organ taken from them is a research object.⁵ I connect this to media studies because that field has been historically interested in the processes and representation enabled by certain technologies. A technology like film or radio mediates a message within its own technologically specific representational affordances, and mediation refers to the ways that technology enables a representational encounter. The specimen mediates a scientist’s observation, as it is framed through technologies of preservation—photography, wet tissue preservation, x-rays—and through the delicate framing of biological material (2.3.1; 2.3.2).⁶

Specimens can be wet tissues preserved in jars (2.2.1; 2.3.1), blood samples, sputum samples, x-rays, clinical photographs, patient histories (2.2.2), or recorded biometrics. The specimen is never a natural object, so much as the byproduct of an extractive process which frames it as natural. Every action that brings it into a scientific context was made through human practices and human technologies. How it is taken, how it is framed, and how the scientist describes the phenomenon on display are the result of a scientist making decisions: deciding to document a patient’s symptoms, deciding to autopsy the patient’s body, deciding to cut an organ from that body, deciding to place that organ into spirit, and deciding how to describe it in their collection (2.3.1; 2.3.2).⁷

In addition to TallBear’s read of Hall’s work on coproduction, I am equally indebted to the Jamaican-British scholar’s essay “Encoding/Decoding.” In the essay, Hall describes how television works in such a way as to give agency to both the producers of information and those that receive it. There is a kind of force in the ways dominant meanings are understood, which are entangled with a kind of discursive training. Hall writes,

since these mappings are ‘structured in dominance’ but not closed, the communicative process consists not in the unproblematic assignment of every visual term to its given position within a set of prearranged codes, but of performative rules—rules of competence and use, of logics-in-use—which seek actively to enforce or pre-fer one semantic domain over another and rule items into and out of their appropriate meaning-sets.⁸

Figure 1. This illustration that accompanied Koch’s Aetiology der tuberculose is only legible to an audience so long as a viewer understands and agrees that the phenomena represented is a microscopic bacterium.Koch, Robert. “Die Ätiologie Der Tuberculose.” In Gesammelte Werke von Robert Koch, 1:446--54, 467--565. Leipzig: Verlag Von Georg Thieme, 1912. Image courtesy of the New York Academy of Medicine.

Hall’s “performative rules” assume that audiences are taught specific technical or genre conventions regarding the meaning of a given piece of art. In the essay, he is referring to television conventions, diffusing the one-way transmission of information in moving image production. What is useful for me, and for this dissertation, is that this framework can also be used to understand scientific argumentation. Medical doctors have long been trained in various visual techniques—clinical vision (1.2.1; 2.2.2), microscopy(2.1.3)—and these forms of argument take time, expertise, and professional standardization to become taken for granted within an scientific discipline. In order to see Mycobacterium tuberculosis through a microscope, a doctor first needed to know how to operate that tool, to accept what they see, and to agree with the method of isolating that material (2.2.1; 2.2.2) (fig. 1).⁹ Scientific observers are primed to read a specimen in a specific way, and the producers of those research objects have to match those same expectations.

The production of specimens is entwined with an epistemic assumption: that knowledge objects can be freely taken for the purpose of scientific argument. A recurring theme in this dissertation is the way medical practitioners map their own beliefs onto the bodies of the sick, and that this mapping creates a terrain from which knowledge may be extracted from those same patients. I use a cartographic metaphor to point toward a colonial spatial ideology—cures are discovered, certain practitioners are pioneers, tuberculosis must be conquered.¹⁰ These implicit ideas of extraction and control are linked to the ways patients’ bodies are seen as resources in medical research (4.2.3). The bodies are seen as repositories of data, which may—and must—be excavated for their potential epistemic use. Johanna Drucker, in an essay on digital humanities critiques of the data sciences, writes,

Data pass themselves off as mere descriptions of a priori conditions. Rendering observation (the act of creating a statistical, empirical, or subjective account or image) as if it were the same as the phenomena observed collapses the critical distance between the phenomenal world and its interpretation, undoing the basis of interpretation on which humanistic knowledge production is based.¹¹

To respond to this falsely ahistorical and apolitical frame of data, Drucker redefines the quantitative material drawn from natural sources as ‘capta’. Operating as a binary opposite of data,

Capta is ‘taken’ actively while data is assumed to be a ‘given’ able to be recorded and observed. From this distinction, a world of differences arises. Humanistic inquiry acknowledges the situated, partial, and constitutive character of knowledge production, the recognition that knowledge is constructed, taken, not simply given as a natural representation of pre-existing fact.¹²

This dissertation articulates the specimen as capta. The research objects that I use in this dissertation are stolen, staged, and deemed natural (0.1.4). There is more than a representational construction of the specimen, but also a naturalization of these research objects which severs them from the original patient’s histories, cultures, and identities.¹³ The specimen is always taken. It is always taken from someone.

In attending to these thefts, there becomes a need to address the various technologies of capture, preservation, and dissemination. The specimen as a media object is an intentionally broad category, attending to the various ways medical researchers ingest materials into their arguments. Media studies, and specifically film studies, has tended to rely on medicine’s use of cinematographic technologies. This means that disciplines like physiology have been examined in great detail,¹⁴ but others remain in need of continued scrutiny.¹⁵ The problem with these medium-first approaches is that they necessarily have to narrow the focus of the research: looking only for research that relied on filmic technologies.

By focusing on the specimen, I turn to look at the ways natural phenomena are made legible in scientific discourses (2.3.1). By shifting to focus on a research object found inside the body of a patient, I am able to shift what media studies can discuss in the production of scientific inquiry. By researching the specimen—which is often bespoke, unique to its construction, and informed by non-capitalized representational technologies—I am able to address a major gap in conversations between media studies and STS. The specimen lets me keep the patient, their life, and their remains in focus (2.4.3; 4.2.4). There are no specimens that can be made without someone’s body—a body that is separate from the doctor’s—which has been taken, brought into a scientific context, and framed to be legible. The person’s life, dying, and death is necessary data for the formulation of pathological knowledge (2.3.2); a person’s life, dying, and death enables the pathological phenomena to exist in the first place. The specimen is not just a change in focus, but one that demands new ethical framework (0.2.2; 4.2.3). These objects were people once. The transformation from patient, to research subject, to research object requires attention and care, which media studies in its focus on image, representation, and technologies of replication, has had difficulty conceptualizing.