Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture

One hundred years after the arrival of cinema and the discovery of X rays in 1895, Lisa Cartwright assesses the impact of medical technographics on the twentieth century in her timely study, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. At first glance, Cartwright’s work offers a reassuring blend of rigorous scholarship and disturbing imagery. (“Medical films are not very pretty,” she warns.) Seeking to formulate “a history and theory of the cinematic gaze in medical culture,” Cartwright attempts, in her own words, “to trace the history of the optical techniques and moving images that set the ground for the contemporary visual analysis of the body in medicine.” Following the critical archaeologies of Michel Foucault and later Jonathan Crary, Sander Gilman, and Barbara Stafford, among others, Cartwright addresses the intersection of scientific and cultural practices, illuminating the numerous ideological effects that are generated and implemented by such convergences. Cartwright supplements her analyses with a spectacular array of medical and popular images of women’s bodies that reveals a profound crisis in the scientific and artistic efforts of “cinema in medical science to analyze, regulate, and reconfigure the transient, uncontrollable field of the body” during the past two centuries. On closer observation, however, any preliminary impressions of familiarity rapidly vanish into the liminal radiance of the medical screen. For Cartwright’s remarkable work, like the glossy images it frames, reveals an uncanny depth that resists the adamant superficiality of the medical archive. In fact, the strength of Cartwright’s study lies precisely in her ability to engage the medical idiom without succumbing to the tremendous lure of its conceptual imperatives. Accordingly, Cartwright’s Screening the Body emerges not as a synthesis of scientific and artistic discourses but rather as an uneasy, sometimes violent, juxtaposition of the institutional force and disposable reproductions that constitute medical configurations of women from the late nineteenth century onward.

Cartwright’s late nineteenth century erupts in the mythical 1895, initiating a doubled trajectory in twentieth-century optics. “To many film historians 1895 is the year of the ‘birth’ of the cinema; for historians of technology and medicine, however, 1895, is the year of the discovery of the X ray.” On December 28, 1895, of course, Auguste and Louis Lumière unveiled their Cinématographe to the general public at the Grand Café in Paris. On November 8 of that year, however, Wilhelm Conrad Roentgen had already discovered the mysterious fluorescent rays he called “X.” Cartwright argues that the two technologies soon veered toward one another, prompting progenitors of the cinema like Thomas A. Edison and the Lumières to turn their attention toward radiography, while radiographers John Macintyre, Robert Janker, and later James Sibley Watson, Jr., adopted the cinema as a means to animate their studies. The reluctance of traditional film historians to address the physiognomic origins of cinema grounds Cartwright’s polemical revision. “One of my primary claims,” she argues, “is that the cinematic apparatus can be considered as a cultural technology for the discipline and management of the human body, and that the long history of bodily analysis and surveillance in medicine and science is critically tied to the history of the cinema as a popular cultural institution and a technological apparatus.” Amidst the accelerating series of graphic instruments designed to expose and record the functions of the animal body—the sphygmoscope, the myograph, and the cardiograph, for example—and nineteenth-century developments in motion photography—the Phenakistoscope, the Zoetrope, the Projecting Praxinoscope, Etienne-Jules Marey’s “chronophotography,” and Eadweard James Muybridge’s studies of animal locomotion, to name a few—cinema and the X ray facilitated, according to Cartwright’s account, a dramatic shift in the course of optical physiology. And while the impact of cinema on twentieth-century visual culture has been frequently documented, the place of the X ray in that narrative has been, Cartwright claims, fundamentally elided. “It is,” she insists, “the most conflicted site, embodying multiple paradigms of visuality and multiple political agendas...