Biomedical Visions : Epistemology, Medicine and Art Practice

Abstract

We live in an age of biomedical visions. There seems to be no end to the demystification of the body through visualization technologies and the promise of health is irresistible. Yet alongside these promising technologies, inequalities in healthcare persist. Life and illness play out in the gap between visualized bodies and ideological notions of health and disease. This publication brings together perspectives from art history, visual science studies, science and technology studies, sociology, and cultural anthropology to encounter watercol- ors, sculpture, comics, advertising, and infographics. Images are a primary way of recognizing the body, but they inevitably promise too much and disappoint us in our quest for bodily self-control. The collection brings together epistemology, medicine and art to understand what biomedicine looks like and how we might view it differently in the past and in the future.