2.1.1: A Physiological Society Presentation

Robert Koch was already known as a prominent bacteriologist when he delivered his essay Aetiology of Tuberculosis in Berlin in 1882. He had, a decade prior, used microphotography to prove the bacterial origin of anthrax (fig. 1), and had returned to present his findings on tuberculosis to the Berlin Physiological Society. Koch had chosen this arena, and not the Pathological Society, because “the latter society was . . . dominated by the eminent Professor of Pathology, Rudolf Virchow. . . . Virchow had not yet accepted the germ theory of infections and had been highly critical of Koch’s earlier work.”¹ Koch quietly walked his audience through his findings, with dozens of specimens around him, proving to the skeptical group of medical scientists the bacterial origins of tuberculosis—Mycobacterium tuberculosis.

Figure 1. A microphotograph taken by Robert Koch to prove the existence of the anthrax bacterium. Koch, Robert. “Verfahren Zur Untersuchung, Zum Konservieren Und Photographieren Der Bakterien.” In Gesammelte Werke von Robert Koch, 1:27--50. Leipzig: Verlag Von Georg Thieme, 1912.

Koch’s findings resulted in a sea change around scientific understandings of tuberculosis: the disease that was thought to be a hereditary, constitutional malady was, in fact, a contagious one.² His findings ushered in the public health, hygienic, and social interventions against the disease in the period (1.3.1; 1.3.4; 1.3.5). Furthermore, Koch’s bacteriological claims were the basis for scientific research into the disease and the authority of some of the most prominent medical researchers in the United States. In 1885 Edward Livingston Trudeau, founder of the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium,³ began operating a small laboratory, from which he published studies regarding the disease (1.2.1; 1.2.2); this lab grew with the sanatorium, bolstered by the inclusion of Edward R. Baldwin and then a cadre of other scientists, like Lawrason Brown.⁴ Other prominent researchers, like H. J. Corper from the City of Chicago Municipal Sanitorium and later National Jewish Hospital for Consumptives (1.2.4), published regularly using bacteriological methods to discuss various aspects of the disease.

Koch’s research was bolstered by two practices. The first was a theoretical one, known as Koch’s postulates, the logic of which proves the existence of a bacterium and its cause of a disease (2.1.3). The other practice was a rhetorical one: he used more than two hundred specimens as part of his presentation, which visually displayed every step in his process.⁵ In an extremely skeptical space, these specimens bolstered support for his bacteriological claims. The experiment was laid out as self-evident, which could be seen as true by even the most intransigent anti-germ theory scientist.

To start this chapter, I want to take an extended look at Koch’s original bacteriological study, to describe, with a non-human example, some of the theoretical and conceptual ideas regarding the visual culture around biomedical specimens. Part of this work will delineate some of the cultural practices which undergird much of the naturalism in the sciences—that is the objective fact as presented in a scientific experiment.⁶ For Koch’s argument to be convincing, doctors had to be trained in microscopy and histology, and for doctors to be trained in these technologies there too needed to be changes in optics and chemistry. For Mycobacterium tuberculosis to appear self-evident required a great deal of other influential processes which informed scientific understanding.

I want to use Koch’s research to define a method for medial media studies research into non-photographic, non-filmic, and non-digital research. While Koch had worked with microphotography for his work on anthrax, he had not been able to apply these methods to tuberculosis; however, so much of his research relies on technological and chemical processes that make scientific representation seem self-evident.⁷ Histochemical methods, the ones that Koch used to make Mycobacterium tuberculosis appear under the microscope, are also means of mediating the natural world, and they are distinct from photochemical ones. Traditional media approaches cannot be taken whole cloth and applied in this case, offering an opportunity to think through an approach to non-filmic and non-digital media in medical sciences. I look to Koch’s research to show the value of media studies in the study and critique of medical knowledge work. I specifically argue for a media studies that, as Lisa Gitelman argues, looks to the “‘little tools of knowledge’, in addition to larger, glitzier—that is, more intensively capitalized—forms.”⁸ While I will be relying heavily on photographic materials later in this chapter, my interest is less in the mechanical reproducibility afforded by the technology,⁹ so much as to ruminate on the other material, mechanical, and cultural processes required for the production of wet tissue specimens (2.2.1; 2.3.1; 2.3.2). Much has been written about clinical photography¹⁰ and so my goal is to tease at the various interrelated material, technological and cultural practices that produce a research object that can be imaged in a scientific context.

Koch’s research provides an excellent place to develop an approach and method to interrogate medical science research from the perspective of media studies. His work was a confluence of practices: the careful maintenance of life and death in guinea pigs (2.1.4), the dying of tissues of tuberculous specimens (2.1.3), and the inspection of those materials under the microscope (2.1.3). Control of life and death saturates these methods, as too does the cultural and technological presumptions that enabled the representations in the first place.

I start with Koch and his research to define how the biomedical specimen functions in a research context. This chapter, however, is not about Koch. I use this beginning case study to think through how the creation of specimens is linked to the historical, cultural and material context in which a research subject died. Koch’s processes, intricate and detailed as they are, reveal how much labor is put into the production of a research object, and how convincing those research objects can be for even the most critical observer.