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Biomedical Visions
Epistemology, Medicine,
and Art Practice
2025. Hatje Cantz Verlag GmbH.
All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the
publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law.
EBSCO Publishing: eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) printed on 12/28/2025 12:59:26 PM
UTC via HERZEN STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY OF RUSSIA 4351047; Elizabeth
Hughes, Alfred Freeborn; Biomedical Visions : Epistemology, Medicine and Art Practice
Account:ehost.
Biomedical Visions
Epistemology, Medicine,
and Art Practice
Edited by Elizabeth W. Hughes
and Alfred Freeborn
EBSCOhost: eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) printed on 12/28/2025 12:59:26 PM UTC via
HERZEN STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY OF RUSSIA. All use subject to
https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use.
Introduction
Alfred Freeborn
On the Use, Reuse, and Misuse of Medical Materials in Art:
A Conversation with Vincent Barras and Jillian Crochet
Virginia Marano, Charlotte Matter, and Laura Valterio
Building Blocks of the Spectrum
Jacob van der Beugel and Lara Keuck
Seeing the Tangled Tendrils Within: Feeling/Seeing
Endometriosis beyond Invisibility
Jaipreet Virdi and Nimisha Bhanot
Mediating Fatigue: From Promotional Material of
Pharmaceuticals in the 1960s to Statistical Maps of Brain
Dysfunction in Present-Day Neuroimaging Research
Paula Muhr and Milton Fernando Gonzalez Rodriguez
Images of Tuberculosis: Seeing and Understanding an Ancient,
Endemic Disease
Stephen A. Geller and Gideon Manning
Patterns of Pathology in Research: The “Art and
Science” of Analyzing Brainwaves in the Mid-Twentieth Century
Flora Lysen and Marlene Bart
Imaginary Imaging: Representing the Normal and the
Pathological in a Vision of Cell-Based Interceptive Biomedicine
Cornelius Borck and Robert Meunier
Building Biosociality through Visualizations of Genome-
Wide Sequencing Risk for an Online Patient Decision-
Making Aid ()
Adam Christianson, Ariane Hanemaayer, Sophia Martineck,
Alexandra Hamann, Jan M. Friedman, and Alison Elliott
Seen but Not Heard
Awa Naghipour, Joana Atemengue Owona, and Golnar Kat
Rahmani
Taking and Making Pictures: The Art of Science and Science
of Art
Cat Dawson
EBSCOhost: eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) printed on 12/28/2025 12:59:26 PM UTC via
HERZEN STATE PEDAGOGICAL UNIVERSITY OF RUSSIA. All use subject to
https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use.
Introduction
Alfred Freeborn
In the spring of 2019, the world-famous singer Ariana Grande shared
images of a brain scan on her Instagram feed, joking that they were
both “hilarious and terrifying” (Sorto 2019). Grande had been open
with the public about her struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder
() after her concert in Manchester, England, in May 2017 was
the target of a suicide bombing attack, which killed twenty-two
people, several of them children. Many of Grande’s 378 million
followers expressed concern at the scans and repeated calls for her
to take a break from the media. In response Grande later wrote on
her Instagram:
didn’t mean to startle anyone with my brain thingy. It just blew
me away. I found it informative and interesting and wanted to
encourage y’all to make sure you check on your brain / listen to
your bodies / take care of yourselves too. I love science and
seeing the physical reality of what’s going on in there was
incredible to me. I mean I feel it all the time, but seeing it is
totally different and super cool . . . just know I will continue
showing up and giving as much of my energy as I can and do
my best even tho my brain looks like the world map. (that’s why
her hairs so big it’s full of trauma . . . k ariana, log off) love u.
(Sorto 2019)
The scans showed Grande’s brain in four different axes, each a
disembodied cerebral cloud of fluorescent color. Posted alongside
another image comparing scans of a healthy brain to one with ,
the scans invite us to discern the patterns of traumatic residue
present in Grande’s brain. Set free from their technical context at the
scanning console, they effortlessly partake in an at once highly
personalized and mass-mediated communication. This moment
captures well the Janus face of biomedical visualizations as they
circulate today. On the one hand, they can legitimize patient
experiences and perceptions and can empower patients and convince
doctors in the search for a diagnosis, treatment, or cure. But they are
also deceptive messengers. Grande’s scan most likely came from
one of the Amen Clinics, a network of expensive single-photon
emission computed tomography () clinics established by the
controversial celebrity psychiatrist Dr. Daniel Amen, who claims to be
able to diagnose and other disorders with the technology. The
reality is, however, that neither Amen nor anyone else can diagnose
with a brain scan and attempts to replicate his claims have
been disappointing. The self-evident value placed on the visualization
is clearly in tension with its questionable legibility. Visualizations in
biomedicine are typically only legible to trained specialists, but these
images spread in the public sphere to be interpreted and
recontextualized by untrained eyes.
The point for Ariana Grande and her followers is not that the image
revealed a new fact about her experience or diagnosis, but that it
made what she already felt visible. Grande’s Instagram post
exemplifies the potent mixture of affect, mediation, and biomedical
technology that has begun to transform late-modern experiences of
health and sickness. To summarize in a deliberately bold fashion:
biomedical technologies increasingly mediate and shape our
subjective experiences of illness, but biomedical knowledge cannot
satisfy our subjective desires for total control of our bodies and their
environments. Biomedical images can validate experiences of illness
—they can make them real, they can make them public—but they can
also conceal the real extent of our biomedical knowledge. We live in
an age of biomedical visions, of promissory technologies and
therapies that will render the truth of our bodies, yet behind these
visions we find the persistence of epistemic uncertainty,
overdiagnosis, unnecessary interventions, and healthcare inequalities.
This is not to downplay the amazing successes of biomedicine, but to
bear witness to the frictions between a scientific ideology inflated by
the expectations of investment capital and its practical realization in
increasingly complex areas of human health and sickness.
But how should we approach this scientific ideology and its diverse
visual incarnations? The term biomedicine has accrued many
meanings: as a type of medicine, as a worldview, as a scientific
framework. Its first usage in the English language occurs in the first
quarter of the twentieth century, where it means the application of the
biological sciences to medical problems. It is our contention, however,
that it is best grasped not through such a static definition but as a
1
historically specific organization of science, technology, and medicine
that fully emerged only in the second half of the twentieth century
(Quirke and Gaudillière 2008). While in epistemological terms the
project of using laboratory biology to investigate disease can be
traced back to the mid-nineteenth century and the age of Claude
Bernard and Rudolf Virchow, it is only a century later that we can
rightly speak of a living and breathing biomedicine in which information
from the lab can be rapidly deployed at the bedside and vice versa
(Keuck and Huber 2017). The sociologists Paul Keating and Alberto
Cambrosio describe the organization of contemporary biomedicine in
terms of “platforms” that involve the regulation and circulation of
samples, entities, and techniques between laboratory and clinic: “in
contemporary hospitals all sorts of body samples leave the patient to
travel routinely and frequently to diagnostic laboratories . . .
[returning] to the patient in the form of results that acquire meaning as
part of the therapeutic relationship that exists between patients and
increasingly complex teams of healthcare professionals” (Keating and
Cambrosio 2003, 6 –7).
Moreover, while commentators have rightly warned against
biomedicalization understood as accelerating the fragmentary and
alienating forces of technoscience in modern society, biomedicine in
practice also offers multiple possibilities for subjectivization (cf.
Clarke et. al. 2009). Genetic tests are worked into a sick individual’s
identity and brain scans become representations of personal trauma
in social media posts. While the body beneath the skin and its
mediation through technology threatens to fragment, displace, and
alienate an individual’s experiences, much work goes into
recontextualizing these technical images within the subjective lifeworld
and life history of the individual. Of course, this movement between
laboratory and lifeworld is not always smooth or linear. Often the
therapeutic relationship is infected with biases and prejudices, or the
bodily sample fails to return to the clinic with meaningful answers.
Patients themselves are increasingly active agents in challenging and
articulating the uncertainty, bias, and prejudice that mark the
movement of biomedical knowledge. It is in this refracted space
between visualized bodies and visions of health and sickness that we
begin our discussion.
Biomedical Visions explores a wide range of biomedical themes:
personalized medicine, neuroimaging, pathology, genetic counseling,
Alzheimer’s disease, endometriosis, chronic fatigue, and structural
inequalities in healthcare. In addition to this broad selection of topics,
the scholarly and artistic methods adopted have both diverse origins
and destinations: perspectives from art history, visual studies of
science, science and technology studies, sociology, and cultural
anthropology converge with watercolor paintings, sculptures, comic
strips, advertisements, and infographics. There is, of course, an
existing wealth of literature across the history, anthropology, and
social studies of biomedicine that has attended to the importance of
visualization and visual technologies (e.g., Clarke et al. 2009;
Edwards 2010). Building on this rich foundation, our collection
examines the interrelation of visual languages and images of sickness
and health; it looks at how technical images are painstakingly
constructed to give realistic or natural visualizations of the body and
its parts; it examines how the human eye (and ear) is trained and
learns to perceive the world, but also how human perception is itself
studied, contrasted with, and disciplined by mechanical vision; it
investigates how visualizations co-construct biomedical imaginaries
and futures (Ostherr 2013). While biomedical technologies are
foregrounded, there is also attention paid to the clinical encounter and
medicine as a social practice. Human beings are complex
biopsychosocial systems with individual life histories that are not
epistemologically exhausted by quantitative definitions of normality
and abnormality. Bodies are more than the abstract objects of
biomedicine; they are archives of concrete experience.
This collection of texts is a series of experiments in cross-
disciplinary collaboration (with a few exceptions). Each chapter is the
product of a unique coming together of two or more different ways of
thinking about biomedicine, knowledge, and the visual. There are
difficulties in working across disciplines. It is not easy for artists to
find scholars who they trust to let them talk about their work. It is not
always easy for clinicians to take a step back and see their work
from a different perspective. The chapters are arranged in a structure
that reflects both the collaboration and the thematic ground covered.
The volume begins with a pair of conversations across artistic
practice, epistemology, and medicine, which literally stage the
opening of a dialogue and an encounter between different
perspectives.
In the opening chapter on “Medical Materials in Art,” the art
historians Virginia Marano, Charlotte Matter, and Laura Valterio
carefully guide us through a discussion with the artist Jillian Crochet
and the medical historian and physician Vincent Barras on the use of
medical materials within different artistic practices. For example, one
of Crochet’s works, Primordial Preservation (2019), involves a plastic
bag filled with green-flecked swamp water from southern Louisiana,
suspended on an stand adorned with a thin snake-like velvet object
filled with sand, being steadily aerated via a tube attached to a motor.
The work probes anxieties about contamination, environment, and
artificial materials or bodies in a particularly personal manner:
Crochet spent years trying to find a diagnosis for her disability, which
one doctor initially explained as a byproduct of living near farms in the
American South where there was heavy use of pesticides like
dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (), but later proved to be the
result of a genetic disease. The uncertainty between genetic and
environmental explanations of disease; the substitution of swamp
water for vital bodily fluids; the contrast of the metal stand with the
ominous snakelike object—all these juxtapositions call into question
the material orders that sustain biomedical visions of health as total
control of the porous borders between our bodies and the messy
environments in which they exist. The question of how medical
materials are used by artists reveals not only the polysemic nature of
these materials but raises fundamental questions about how medicine
creates and is shaped by material orders in its vision of a healthy
“normal” body and environment.
Taking materiality in a different direction, “Building Blocks of the
Spectrum” explores how specific materials lend themselves to artistic
visualizations of biomedical ideologies and, at the same time, how
biomedical research makes use of particular visual practices,
diagrams, and concepts. The artist Jacob van der Beugel and the
historian and philosopher of medicine Lara Keuck converse together
on how artistic practice can be a site to reflect on and question the
promissory claims of biomedical visions, with particular regard to
research into Alzheimer’s disease. Anchoring their conversation
around van der Beugel’s mural Matter in Grey (2018) for the
Chemistry of Health Department at Cambridge University, a series of
spectrums depicting healthy, diseased, and treated brain cells in
concrete, they unpack the work of the spectrum concept across
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