“Dictaphone, Radiopager, Telehealth: Media Technology as Medical Technology”

Jeremy Greene (Johns Hopkins University)

A cardiologist in Portland learns to monitor the aberrant rhythms of his patient’s heart via a wireless device. In Omaha, a team of specialists conducts a complex neuropsychiatric evaluation of a woman confined to a mental hospital in another part of the state, using an interactive viewscreen. In the middle of the night, a Cincinnati pediatrician tests out a brand-new technology to listen to the chest of an ailing boy miles away, without leaving his own bed. These three scenes are set not in the near future, nor the present day, but in the past: in 1964, in 1957, in 1879. And yet they are part of a broader omission in our collective history and historiography: that communications technologies like the telephone, the radio, and the television were often rapidly adapted as medical technologies as well. This talk seeks to reanimate the hopes and fears stirred by earlier visions of electronic medicine, to explore the technical, logistical, existential and moral concerns that became palpable when older analog media were introduced into medicine. In turn, I suggest that a broader media history of medicine can help to reframe current debates over the promise and perils of digital health by examining the continuity--and change--in the successive challenges posed by a series of older "new media" in medicine from the late 19th century to the present.

“Film, Television, and Medium Specificity in Postwar Biomedical Science Education”

Scott Curtis (Northwestern University)

An important insight for a media history of science is that no one medium—whether it be writing, imaging, or other types of notation or recording—dominates and defines exhaustively the process of communication. Moving images function differently than still photographs or graphs or the written word and vice versa. The pressing historiographical question, then, is how do these media function, and what difference does the choice of medium make? This is not a question media scholars often ask with regard to scientific imaging, or one historians of science often ask with regard to media; most discussions treat all media as equally transparent conveyers of a message without considering how the formal properties of the image might affect our interpretation of any message or indeed the researchers’ own understanding of their object of study. To approach these questions, this presentation will compare the use of film and television in medical schools and laboratories after WWII. It will demonstrate that researchers and educators were indeed sensitive to formal properties, such as the density, grain, and clarity of the image, as well as to the different capabilities of the technologies. This paper argues that researchers had their own implicit or explicit theories of medium specificity, which are essential factors in explaining historical patterns in the scientific use of media and therefore should heighten our sensitivity to the formal specificity of media in the history of science and medicine.

“Crossing Boundaries: Audio-visual Media in the Mind Sciences of the Child”

Felix Rietmann (Princeton University)

Over the last forty years in the mind sciences of the child and infant mental health, audiovisual media have become ubiquitous tools for scientific study, educational training and clinical care. Video, sound, and motion recordings guide psychological assessments, contribute to therapeutic interventions, and structure both research projects and daily routines. This paper engages with the historical origins of these practices and their historiographical implications for the history of science and medicine. I argue that a new way of thinking about, looking at, and caring for infants emerged and spread in child psychology, psychiatry, and pediatrics in the USA and Western Europe in the 1970s and 1980s. Both articulation and dispersion of this vision, across disciplines and in culture at large, were intimately bound to the clinical and epistemic possibilities offered by audiovisual media. I will suggest that these media functioned as versatile tools that crossed and lowered intellectual and spatial, as well as disciplinary and institutional boundaries. The paper thus proposes that a historiographical focus on media offers an opportunity for shedding light on links and entanglements of scientific, medical, and cultural practice. At the same time, such a focus requires careful and contextualized attention to the particularities and properties of media-in-use. The talk reflects on how the history of science and medicine can here benefit from recent approaches in film and media studies.

“Mirroring Anthropology: Media Theory in Papua New Guinea”

Katja Guenther (Princeton University)

Funded by the Australian government, the American anthropologist Edmund Carpenter set out in 1969 to Papua New Guinea. He considered one of the indigenous populations there, the Biami, to be “living ancestors” in the sense that they had not been exposed to the media of modern western civilization. Most importantly, due to the absence of stagnant water in their environment, the Biami were “mirror-naïve.” Carpenter wanted to perform a number of “reflexivity studies” to test the media theories that he had developed over the previous decade in collaboration with Marshall McLuhan. He introduced the Biama to playback video, photographs and mirrors, to measure the corrupting effects of media on their psyche and culture. As he conducted the experiments, however, Carpenter came increasingly to doubt the ethics and epistemology of his research project, placing himself at the center of a divisive debate within anthropology about its role and professional research norms. He shut his study down after only one year and never submitted his report to the Australian government, whose policies of assimilation had made him increasingly suspicious. By examining the complex influence of geo-political forces in the postcolonial world and disciplinary developments in anthropology on the emergence and development of media theory, this paper reflects upon the latter’s meaning and potential, and considers its advantages and limitations in the study of the history of science