Prentice, Rachel (Author)
This dissertation recounts the development of graphic models of human bodies and virtual reality simulators for teaching anatomy and surgery to medical students, residents, and physicians. It considers how researchers from disciplinary cultures in medicine, engineering, and computer programming come together to build these technologies, bringing with them values and assumptions about bodies from each of their disciplines, values and assumptions that must be negotiated and that often are made material and embedded in these new technologies. It discusses how the technological objects being created privilege the body as a dynamic and interactive system, in contrast to the description and taxonomic body of traditional anatomy and medicine. It describes the ways that these technologies create new sensory means of knowing bodies. And it discusses the larger cultural values that these technologies reify or challenge. The methodology of this dissertation is ethnography. I consider in-depth one laboratory at a major medical school, as well as other laboratories and researchers in the field of virtual medicine. I study actors in the emerging field of virtual medicine as they work in laboratories, at conferences, and in collaborations with one another. I consider the social formations that are developing with this new discipline. Methods include participant-observation of laboratory activities, teaching, surgery, and conferences and extensive, in- depth interviewing of actors in the field. I draw on the literatures in the anthropology of science, technology, and medicine, the sociology of science, technology, and medicine, and the history of science and technology to argue that "bodies of information" are part of a bio-engineering revolution that is making human bodies more easily viewed and manipulated. Science studies theorists have revealed the constructed, situated, and contingent nature of technoscientific communities and the objects they work with. They also have discussed how technoscientific objects help create their subjects and vice versa. This dissertation considers these phenomena within the arena of virtual medicine to intervene in debates about the body, about simulation, and about scientific cultures. (Copies available exclusively from MIT Libraries, Rm. 14-0551, Cambridge, MA 02139-4307. Ph. 617-253-5668; Fax 617-253-1690.)
...MoreDescription Cited in Diss. Abstr. Int. A 65/05 (2004): 1845. UMI pub. no. 0806384.
Article
Johnson, Ericka;
(2007)
Surgical Simulators and Simulated Surgeons: Reconstituting Medical Practice and Practitioners in Simulations
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The Experimenter's Museum: GenBank, Natural History, and the Moral Economies of Biomedicine
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Book
Mitchell, Robert;
Thurtle, Phillip;
(2004)
Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information
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Sonenberg, Nahum;
Filipowicz, Witold;
(2012)
Aaron Shatkin (1934--2012)
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Elena Varotto;
Mauro Vaccarezza;
Roberta Ballestriero;
Domenico Tafuri;
Francesco Galassi;
(2019)
The teaching of anatomy throughout the centuries: from Herophilus to plastination and beyond
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Thesis
Levy, Jean Elizabeth;
(2007)
Controlling the Course of Scientific Advance: The Case of Human Embryology
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Maggini, Golfo;
(2013)
Bodily Presence, Absence, and their Ethical Challenges: Towards a Phenomenological Ethics of the Virtual
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Masco, Joseph;
(2004)
Nuclear technoaesthetics: Sensory politics from trinity to the virtual bomb in Los Alamos
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Weniger, Wolfgang J.;
Tassy, Olivier;
Darras, Sébastien;
Geyer, Stefan H.;
Thieffry, Denis;
(2004)
From Experimental Imaging Techniques to Virtual Embryology
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Thesis
Tovino, Stacey A.;
(2006)
The Visible Brain: Confidentiality and Privacy Implications of Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging
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Book
Silvia Casini;
(2021)
Giving Bodies Back to Data: Image Makers, Bricolage, and Reinvention in Magnetic Resonance Technology
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Michael F. McGovern;
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Genes go digital: Mendelian Inheritance in Man and the genealogy of electronic publishing in biomedicine
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Book
Franklin, Sarah;
(2013)
Biological Relatives: IVF, Stem Cells, and the Future of Kinship
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Thesis
Christopher D. Willoughby;
(2016)
Pedagogies of the Black Body: Race and Medical Education in the Antebellum United States
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Cremer, Christoph;
Masters, Barry R.;
(2013)
Resolution Enhancement Techniques in Microscopy
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Bronwyn Parry;
(January 2018)
The Social Life of “Scaffolds” Examining Human Rights in Regenerative Medicine
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Quake, Stephen R.;
(Fall 2013)
Microfabrication: The Interface Between Medicine and Engineering
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Book
Katerina Sideri;
(2016)
Bioproperty, Biomedicine and Deliberative Governance: Patents as Discourse on Life
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Thesis
Hurlbut, James Benjamin;
(2010)
Experiments in Democracy: The Science, Politics and Ethics of Human Embryo Research in the United States, 1978--2007
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Thesis
Rogers, Susan Nadia;
(2011)
Social Arrangements in Genomic Science: How Microarray Data and Researchers Shaped Each Other
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