Manifesting Medicine: Bodies and Machines (review)

Manifesting Medicine: Bodies and Machines. Edited by Robert Bud, Bernard Finn, and Helmuth Trischler. The Netherlands: Harwood, 1999. Pp. xviii+180. $46/$24.

This book marks the inauguration of a new series, cosponsored by the Deutsches Museum in Munich, the Science Museum in London, and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The well-illustrated volume successfully highlights the complex ways in which historians and curators can work with objects, beyond merely using them as illustrations for previously developed ideas. The essays in the first part of the book were drawn from a conference and use museum-based artifacts to address specific historical questions. Those in the second part of the book focus on exhibits and the history of medical museums. Collectively, they build on recent scholarship regarding material culture to show that taking objects seriously can change the questions we ask and illuminate the way we present history.

Two essays address medical instruments, which were long the focus of histories of medical technology but here receive creative treatments that engage with current trends in cultural history and the sociology of science. Kim Pelis analyzes the cultural meanings of the blood transfusion procedures and apparatus of London physician James Blundell in the early nineteenth century. She draws on diverse literary and scientific sources in order to show how Blundell came to consider the therapeutic potential of transfusion for uterine hemorrhaging in the intellectual and professional context of Romanticism and vitalism, particularly regarding transfusion as a "re-animation of the apparent dead" (p. 3). Ghislaine Lawrence draws on recent work in the sociology of science and technology to show how competing interests in the local culture of British cardiac surgery in the 1960s shaped the design of one surgeon's apparatus for open-heart surgery. Lawrence not only demonstrates how the form of Charles Drew's profound hypothermia apparatus depended on factors other than basic function, she also contributes to the literature on the "losers" of history by highlighting a technology that does not fit in the direct path to current open-heart surgery.

Three other essays draw attention to the significance of medical technologies aside from instruments. Klaus Vogel traces the trajectory of the Transparent Man, a mannequin whose bones, blood vessels, and organs are visible. He follows the exhibit from its roots in the international public health exhibitions of the early twentieth century, through its central role in the building of the German Hygiene Museum in 1930, to its increasing international mobility in the 1930s and after World War II. Johannes Abele focuses on the impact of perceptions of radiation protection on the design of the Geiger-Müller tube, showing how social negotiations over expertise, standardization, and automation became embedded in the tube's design; here, additional evidence for the popular view that measuring radiation equaled controlling it would have strengthened the argument.

Finally, Patricia Peck Gossel tells the history of compliance packaging for the Pill as a story of patient-driven innovation, in contrast to pharmaceutical or physician-driven change. Her analysis rests on a unique set of sources: the personal collection of the original patent holder for compliance packaging, David P. Wagner. This essay is particularly well illustrated, and provides fascinating evidence for how packaging concerns changed the number of birth control pills women took each month. While Gossel raises gender issues--for example, the view of women as particularly forgetful patients--she could have pushed her analysis further in her references to Wagner's invention as patient-driven, given that Wagner's wife was officially the patient.

In the second part of the book, Timothy Boon describes the innovative Science Museum exhibition Health Matters as part of his assessment of the impact of changing notions of history on how curators organize exhibitions and collections. Health Matters seeks to challenge viewers' assumptions about scientific knowledge by providing narratives other than technological progress, such as the popular representation of medicine and the perspectives of patients. The exhibit also juxtaposes unexpected objects, as...