Anatomical Transparency: Röentgen’s Rays and the New Ways of Seeing

This podcast traces the beginnings of X-rays as the new objective medium to demonstrate the interior of the body, its latest transparency that has given way to the ultrasound, the CAT scan, the MRI and the PET scan. With each there had been a rapid public acceptance but also a social expectation of use that has seen the more complex machinery devolve into more peripheral environments somewhat at the expense of the trusted clinical examination of the patient first defined in its exactness by Boerhaave and Bichat and by Laennec’ s invention of the stethoscope.

 

Photography in replacing the anatomical artist relied on its unmodified precision but the newer radiological imagery depends for accuracy on post-processing of the image (its own photoshop if you will). Society is inundated with the radiological imagery of humans just as much as the leading protagonist of Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, young Hans Castorp carried around the picture of his love Claudia Chauchat. In the Davos Tuberculosis sanitorium where he spent 4 years carried close to his heart was not her photograph but rather a copy of her Chest X-ray.

 

Featured Martha Argerich playing the Capriccio Partita in C Minor by J.S. Bach