Medical screening: medical imag[in]ing, the body, and the self.

Abstract

This dissertation examines representations of medical imaging technologies in order to understand how sick artists (writers, painters, and filmmakers) use diagnostic technologies in their work to assert their subjectivity in the face of medicine's efforts to objectify them. It uses the phrase "medical imag[in]ing technology" to refer broadly to visual and aural aids that have assisted physicians and surgeons with their work, and focuses primarily on the X-ray, the microscope, and the telephone, which had a brief stint as a proto-ultrasound device at President James A. Garfield's deathbed. Its chapters engage a series of texts connected in their efforts to understand the body through medical imag[in]ing technologies: Thomas Mann's 1924 novel The Magic Mountain, Alice James's diary, Frida Kahlo's paintings, Sergio Leone's westerns, Norman Mailer's films and writings, and the narratives surrounding the James-Younger Gang's 1876 raid on Northfield, Minnesota, and the 1881 assassination of President Garfield. I posit that these nineteenth and twentieth century texts and their efforts to understand both illness and medicine through medical imaging technologies anticipate contemporary efforts to involve patients in their health care through online medical records, illness blogs, and illness-based social networking sites.