An introduction to the dissertation, this chapter describes how media studies can be applied to the history of medicine. To do this, it describes how the broad term specimen–or object extracted from a naturally occurring body or phenomenon–can be used to think about the extractive practices central western epistemics.
Defining the major theories and ideas that guide this study, this section argues for how media studies can frame and discuss problems in the history of medicine.
Subsections:
0.1.1 | 0.1.2 | 0.1.3 | 0.1.4 | 0.1.5
Subsections: 0.3.1
This chapter examines medical visual culture in the context of the sanatorium movement. Thinking about the limitations of Michel Foucault’s notions of the clinical gaze, this chapter argues for an expanded understanding of medicine’s visual practices.
Outlining the theoretical and conceptual underpinnings of this chapter, this section discusses the limitations of clinical gaze-based critiques of medicine.
Subsections:
1.1.1 | 1.1.2 | 1.1.3
A case study of the sanatorium movement and its visual practices, this section begins with an examination of E. L. Trudeau’s work at the Adirondack Cottage Sanitarium and ends with a look at the sanatoria built in Colorado at the turn of the twentieth century.
Subsections:
1.2.1 | 1.2.2 | 1.2.3 | 1.2.4 | 1.2.5
This section looks to the ways sanatoria and public health officials taught hygiene to people with tuberculosis. This case study examines how these lessons reified white supremacist and bourgeois notions of health in relation to tuberculosis.
Subsections:
1.3.1 | 1.3.2 | 1.3.3 | 1.3.4 | 1.3.5
This section examines the doctors who have been photographed in the tuberculosis corpus. It ruminates on what contexts in which medical professionals are imaged, and thinks about how consent operates in medicine’s visual practices.
Subsections:
1.4.1 | 1.4.2
This chapter examines the processes in which dying subjects are turned into research objects in the study of tuberculosis. Starting with Robert Koch’s microbial studies and ending with the examination of the use of wet tissue specimens this chapter advocates for theoretical and ethical frameworks that centralize the continuity between dying patient and the research objects produced from their bodies.
This section examines Robert Koch’s bacteriological research into tuberculosis. This case study frames an approach to medical media studies, and an emphasis on the human specimen.
Subsections:
2.1.1 | 2.1.2 | 2.1.3 | 2.1.4
This section looks to the medical histories which commonly accompany wet tissue specimens in tuberculosis research.
Subsections:
2.2.1 | 2.2.2 | 2.2.3 | 2.2.4
This section uses the work of George E. Bushnell, a US Army doctor during the first world war, to consider the extractive framing practices necessary to produce wet tissue specimens.
Subsections:
2.3.1 | 2.3.2
Concluding the chapter, this section critiques new materialist approaches to relation, as a mean to think through the ethical problems of using human tissues in medical research, as well as the history of medicine.
Subsections:
2.4.1 | 2.4.2 | 2.4.3
This chapter examines how arts-based methods informed how this dissertation engaged with medicine’s visual culture. Using three media art projects developed in the exploratory phase in research as case studies, this chapter outlines methods and approaches other arts-based researchers may apply to their own investigation.
In the introduction to the chapter on arts-based research methods, this chapter reflects on previous artworks developed by the author. In doing so, this section defines an approach to creative methodologies in research that emphasize iteration and critical reflection.
Subsections:
3.1.1 | 3.1.2 | 3.1.3 | 3.1.4
This section examines two media art installations developed by the author in 2021 and 2022. These projects show a shifting approach to opaque methodologies, and a changing understanding of ethics in the history of medicine.
Subsections:
3.2.1 | 3.2.2 | 3.2.3 | 3.2.4 | 3.2.5 | 3.2.6
Using the photo essay ‘Dermographic Opacities’ as its case study, this section delineates how media art installations were applied to a born-digital, web-based photo essay.
Subsections:
3.3.1 | 3.3.2 | 3.3.3 | 3.3.4
Reflecting on the three projects outlined in the previous sections, this conclusion thinks through an issue when arguing for new methodologies: how can arts-based research be used in new scholarship, if it is not necessarily better than or superior to already establish humanistic methods?
Subsections:
3.4.1 | 3.4.2 | 3.4.3
This chapter describes how the theoretical frameworks regarding opacity and refusal informed the final dissertation platform–the Opaque Online Publishing Platform. To do this, it navigates disparate stands of thought in the digital humanities, and Indigenous critiques of western colonialism.
This section describes how the Opaque Online Publishing Platform resulted from the combination of critical digital humanities practices and anticolonial theory. This section outlines the theoretical and practical considerations made in the development of the platform.
Subsections:
4.1.1 | 4.1.2 | 4.1.3 | 4.1.4
This section details how modes of refusal are used in and against academic research, describing a need for scholars to consider speculative approaches that take research subjects’ personhood into account.
Subsections:
4.2.1 | 4.2.2 | 4.2.3 | 4.2.4
This section goes into the workflows and code that enabled the final dissertation to be published on the web.
Subsections:
4.3.1 | 4.3.2 | 4.3.3 | 4.3.4 | 4.3.5
Subsections: 4.4.1
Subsections: 5.1.1 | 5.1.2 | 5.1.3 | 5.1.4
This part of the appendix covers the workflow and protocols for developing the tuberculosis corpus and image dataset.
Subsections:
X.1.1 | X.1.2 | X.1.3
This part of the appendix covers the code associated with the Opaque Online Publishing Platform that was not included in the fourth chapter.
Subsections:
X.2.1 | X.2.2 | X.2.3 | X.2.4
This part of the appendix has information related to the various media art installations produced during this research project.
Subsections:
X.3.1 | X.3.2 | X.3.3
This dissertation examines the ways human subjects were turned into research objects as part of the war against tuberculosis.
Sean Purcell,2023 - 2025. Community-Archive Jekyll Theme by Kalani Craig is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Framework: Foundation 6.