Medical Humanities Blog

Imaging the Medical Humanities: The Brain (Part I)

Sorry for the slow-blogging.  I've had several conferences in the last few weeks, been traveling, and been preparing for my upcoming qualifying exams. 

In lieu of "real" blogging, here's an installment in the Imaging the Medical Humanities series of posts.  One of the conferences I spoke at involved neuroethics, and much of my examinations will deal with pain and related matters of mind and neuroethics, so I thought it might be appropriate to do several posts on brain images in the West.  Part I takes us from the early Renaissance to the early modern era in the late 17th century.  As usual, I make no pretense to thoroughness, but hope to present a small and not necessarily representative sample of some interesting and significant images of the brain in the West over the last 500 years or so.

On Unnatural Causes

Look, there's nothing I can possibly say about the upcoming documentary Unnatural Causes that either I haven't already said, or that others haven't already said much better.  In many ways, the issues regarding public health policy and the social determinants of health I've been covering here on MH Blog are encapsulated neatly in the documentary.

It's a four-part series, beginning tomorrow, March 27, on PBS at 10 pm EST (I think, check local listings).  If you care at all about health and illness, it's an absolute must. 

I feel particularly fortunate because I will have the opportunity to meet some of the producers at the Intercultural Cancer Council Biennial Symposium on Minorities, the Medically Underserved & Cancer April 3-6.  I'll try to post something as a follow-up.  Any MH Blog readers who will be attending the conference are encouraged to drop by and say hello.

In any case, watch the documentary!

UPDATE: Well? What say you all? I loved it; thought it was terrific.  Interviewed many of the right people (Kawachi, Krieger, Williams, Christakis, Marmot, among others), made key points about chronic stress and the neuroendocrine pathway (which we've noted here), and talked at length about the social gradient of health.  There's obviously going to be many who differ on the appropriate policy prescriptions, but I thought it laid the groundwork very well.

Imaging the Medical Humanities: St. Patrick's Day

It's been awhile since we've done any posts in the Imaging series, so here's a couple of images collected in honor of St. Patrick's Day, the national holiday of Ireland.

On The Rolling Exhibition

I was fortunate to catch the story on 20/20 about Kevin Connelly, a photographer and professional athlete (Note: there is much to comment on regarding the program's portrayal of Connelly, but I want this post to be more about Connelly and less about media criticism).  Connelly, who won a silver medal in the X-Games for mono skiing, lives in Bozeman, MT.  Using his winnings, Connelly indulged his travel bug, and took approximately 36,000 photographs along the way.

Connelly's gaze is particularly important because of its vantage point, and because of what stares back into it.  Connelly was born without legs, and primarily uses a skateboard for personal locomotion.  As he maneuvers himself with his left hand, which is also used for propulsion, he maintains balance with his right hand while simultaneously snapping photographs with the camera.  The camera is in his right hand, generally.

There is an excellent literature in disability studies on the gaze, explored through critical analysis of literature as well as of visual media like art, dance, and performance studies.  What Connelly stares back into is the freakifying gaze of passers-by as they gawk at him.  In the interview, Connelly, who was articulate, forthcoming, and insightful, indicated that, on the one hand, he understands the curiousity underlying the gaze.  Yet, on the other, he was getting tired of all the unadulterated stares, and so he began taking pictures as a means of gazing back.  What stories are his interlocutors constructing? How do they make meaning of what they see before them (Connelly)?

What's more, Connelly manages to keep the gazes appropriately contextualized.  The narratives his subjects construct vary widely with culture and context.  As he notes on his web site:

1 year ago I was asked by a little boy in Christchurch, New Zealand if I had been eaten by a shark.

2 months ago I was asked by an elderly woman in Sighisoara, Romania if I had lost my legs in a car accident.

6 weeks ago I was asked by a bar patron in Helena, Montana if I still wore my dog tags from Iraq.

Everyone tries to create a story in their heads to explain the things that baffle them.

One should not lose sight of the quality of the art: Connelly is a talented photographer.  The expressions of his subjects, Connelly's use of art in a performative, empowering way, to stare back at those who stare at him, comes together in a collage of cultures, faces, and stories.

Recommended.

The Library of Medicine's Online Collection

Disability studies blogger extraordinaire Penny Richards brings word that the National Library of Medicine has an extensive online collection.  She has a fascinating post on how technical innovations are often developed "first for disability-related applications and only later translated to wider use."

Though I'll hopefully have more substantive commentary on some of the images for a future Imaging the Medical Humanities post, but given my interest in pain, I pulled these images (below the fold) that may be of interest.

Imaging the Medical Humanities: On Aesthethics & Disability

Laura Ferguson, an artist working in New York City, has put together a phenomenal blog post at the Literature, Arts & Medicine Blog.  I'd like to use it to frame this installment in the Imaging the Medical Humanities series.  She writes,

Can a deformed body be beautiful? Yes, through an artist’s eyes – and I believe art can help medicine to broaden its vision, and embrace a new aesthetic of the body.

I’m an artist and for the past twenty years I’ve been using my own body, inside and out, as the subject of my work. My anatomy is an unusual one because of scoliosis, a curvature of the spine, and I found intriguing visual possibilities in the image of a body that was beautiful yet flawed. My drawings are quite intimate and personal, and at the same time strongly based on science, on an understanding of anatomy and physiology, and specifically on medical images of my own skeleton that were made for this purpose.

She notes that while many doctors have commented on the beauty of her portraits and the insight it provides, "almost all the orthopedists who tell me they love my work also try to convince me I should have more surgery – whether or not I’ve asked them for medical advice. Ultimately, it seems they can’t help but see an unusual anatomy as a problem to be fixed."

This is a key problem with the medical model of disability, that it sees difference as abnormal, as something that requires fixing.  This has a number of deleterious effects, not least of which is that it attaches notions of deviance to difference.  Many disabled persons internalize this construction; as I have noted before, I can only begin to imagine the suffering of a person who " has constantly been told that they are, in essence, less than what they should be, that they are less than whole, somehow incomplete, inferior to others who do not have the impairment(s) at issue." 

The construction of disabled identity as a lack, as dysfunction, has also had grave social consequences.  Because disabled persons' bodies have traditionally been assessed in terms of this lack, this deviance, they have been ripe for exploitation in unethical human subjects research.  Goodman et al.'s notion of human subjects research being a means of rendering un-useful bodies useful to the state is relevant in explaining further how the medical model of disability has been turned to dark ends.  The extremely popular eugenics movement of the early 20th century is intimately connected to this frame, as well as being another manifestation of overt reliance on a conception of disability as deviance.

I wholeheartedly agree with Ferguson that "art is a good place to look for an alternative aesthetic," one that explores the ambiguities of bodies and the possibilities of a conception of difference without a necessary connection to deviance.  While there are many wonderful disability artists, I am continually moved by Riva Lehrer's art, such as this:

Imaging the Medical Humanities: Vesalius

It should be plain that visual studies are not my field of expertise.  Nevertheless, it is equally plain that images are of great significance for the medical humanities.  Accordingly, I am initiating a new category of posts here at MH Blog, "Imaging the Medical Humanities."  The idea is to bring a visual element into the conversation, and then to say something briefly about the image's significance for the medical humanities.

While I am no art historian, I am indubitably, as any 'hermeneutician' would say, an interpreter. 

For obvious reasons, I chose to start the series with an image taken from De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543):