Isabelle Dussauge, Royal Institute of Technology
Anatomy, Western medicine’s visual system of representation of the body as a spatially organized set of tissues and organs, was marked by major cultural consecrations in the 1990s and 2000s. This paper focuses on the technological mediation of the anatomic body, which may be understood as part of classical anatomy’s triumph in turn-of-millenary medicine.

Three examples of this cultural triumph are the Visible Human Project, the Bodyworlds exhibition, and the attribution of the 2003 Nobel Prize in medicine to magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The Visible Human Project achieved in 1994 the first all-digital, anatomical, three-dimensional visual database of the human body for research and commercial use. Bodyworlds, Gunther von Hagens’ exhibition of plastinated corpses re-fashioned as statues to meet Renaissance’s artistic conventions of anatomic depiction, attracted millions of visitors and gave rise to mediatic and scholarly debates about the purpose and ethics of bodily display. Two developers of the medical imaging technology MRI were attributed a Nobel Prize in 2003 for making imaging possible on the basis of earlier technologies used for quantitative measurements in physics and chemistry.

The raise of digital anatomy and van Hagens’ refashioning of dead bodies triggered controversies and scholarly interest, not least in the field of Science, Technology and Society studies. At stake were, among others, the consequences of the ways by which these anatomical representations were produced, and the fascination that representation’s power to produce bodies has exerted on the observers. In contrast, MRI’s consecration as an icon of present times’ bodily imaging was hardly subjected to contestation. This paper takes its queue in the paradoxical observation that medical imaging, when kept within the realm of medicine, seemed to be considered both as a breakthrough—which the 2003 Nobel Prize in medicine illustrates—and as a fully naturalized way to produce images of the body.

Looking back in the history of medicine shows that the MRI-visualizations developed in the 1980s, although produced by highly automatized technological means, were strikingly alike 19th century anatomists’ bodily depictions. Historians of medicine and technology have also shown how earlier representations techniques such as anatomical depiction in the early modern times and the Renaissance, or microscopy and early cinematography in the 19th century, were co-constitutive of emergent notions of life and of the body. This paper therefore aims to shed light upon how MRI’s ways of viewing the body were shaped in relation to earlier established technological ways to produce the body.

I will use the Foucauldian concept of gaze to account for medicine’s ways of seeing the body in a knowledge-making process. The gazes at stake in this paper were technologically-dependent: microscopes, X-rays, flowmeters, and not least, MRI’s magnets, coils and radio waves were the sites through which specific gazes were explored, shaped, established. I will address the following issues: How were MRI’s open-ended representations constrained to align with earlier technologically produced bodies? Concretely, how was the MRI-gaze shaped so as to produce pathological anatomy’s bodies, on the one hand, and other bodies such as the physiological body made of flows and motions, on the other? How did the shaping of the MRI-gaze re-cast the relations between the observer (researcher or clinician), technology, gazes, and the body observed?

I will argue that the MRI-gaze was shaped so as to enact a remediation of pathological anatomy’s gaze and, to a lesser extent, of physiology’s gaze, and conclude by drawing together the main aspects and consequences of this remediation process.