Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
'known strangers'. By and large, Frank's (1995) observation that by telling
their stories, ill persons offer themselves as a guide to the self-formation of
others seems to describe very well what the authors on this site are doing.
When people account for their illness, they articulate their experiences,
perceptions and understandings (Hydén 1997). The following analysis of
these experiences, perceptions and understandings is guided by two theoretical
perspectives - phenomenology and the theory of social representations.
I will fi rst describe the technological preconditions for the diagnosis of
intracranial aneurysm. Then I will present a more detailed account of the
clinical condition concerning a bleeding or rupturing aneurysm, and also
an analysis of patients' and relatives' experiences of a bleeding, ruptured
or treated aneurysm. Finally, I will deal more closely with some social
representations of brain aneurysms that have emerged on the studied Internet
site, and discuss how conceptions of the condition as an 'embodied risk' have
a potential to intervene in the ambiguous clinical situation and make even
patients without symptoms ask for, or comply with, hazardous intervention
in order to reconstruct normality.
Intracranial aneurysms and their technological preconditions
On 8 November 1895, the German physicist Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen
accidentally discovered some special kind of rays. It turned out that these
so-called X-rays were able to make certain kinds of internal structures of
objects stand out as shadows against a fl uorescent screen or photographic
plate. Only a few days after Röntgen had for the fi rst time communicated his
discovery in a scientifi c context, the European and American general public
could read about this in the daily press. And in February 1896 an important
media event occurred when Thomas Edison tried to X-ray the human brain
in front of an assembled press audience (Jülich 2002).
Röntgen's discovery was a condition for the construction of the X-ray
apparatus, the birth of an entire new discipline, radiology, and for the creation
of a new medical profession with interpretation of images as a speciality
(Pasveer 1989). Less than ten years after Röntgen's discovery, a German-
Austrian physician published the results of his intensive efforts to apply the
X-ray technique on the skull. But it took several decades of discoveries,
innovations and experimenting on animals, patients and dead bodies before
the technology and its users had the capacity to disclose safe information
about the interior of the skull - despite Edison's 1896 efforts in front of
the media audience. Not until the technique to inject air or some substances
opaque to X-rays 'in the body normally “mute” to X rays' (Fishgold and
Bull 2002: 17) was invented, could radiologists start to visualize various
pathological abnormalities in the brain on a more regular basis.
In medical practice, doctors knew (through post mortem examination)
before the invention of X-ray technology that human beings could present
balloon-shaped deformations in a vessel wall, so-called intracranial
