Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
the static medium of photography was regarded within nineteenth-
century science, medicine and state institutions as an instrument
particularly well suited to the study of anatomy and morphology.
(Cartwright 1995: xii)
As seen above, Cartwright relates morphology (form and structure) to
a static visualisation technology: the photographic picture. In cytology
laboratories cell morphology is interpreted with another visual technology:
the microscope. It is important to consider that neither the microscope nor
the cell simply 'is' in the realm of biomedicine and cancer disease prevention.
Indeed, the term 'cell' seems to be intertwined with and dependent on the
microscope. According to medical historians, the word 'cell' was fi rst used
in 1665 when the English scientist Robert Hooke put a piece of cork under
a microscope and distinguished compartments which he called 'cells' (Singer
and Underwood 1962: 132). At times, the microscope has been discussed
simultaneously with the telescope (see e.g. Butler
et al
. 1986; Fox Keller
1996; McGrath 2002). Both instruments emerged during the fi rst decade
of the seventeenth
century and both can be seen as mediators: the telescope
revealing outer space and the microscope revealing small parts of nature and
the human body.
McGrath (2002) discusses shifting communication problems in regard to
the representation of what was seen in the microscope from the seventeenth
until the nineteenth century. For example, 'in order to have currency, foreign
objects had to be translated into imagery' (ibid.: 171). The early microscopists
drew sketches: later they used photographs. Since 'the specimen did not speak
for itself but had to be read' (ibid.: 164), there were diffi culties in accounting
for and recognising what was seen, especially for new phenomena which
lacked material for comparison. To gain credibility for the claims of what was
seen the use of mechanical standards and formal properties such as 'shape,
colour, edge or border, size, transparency, surface' were emphasised.
6
Early
on, training and experience were emphasised. Today, explanatory pictures
of the body's inside are common in anatomy, physiology and/or pathology
atlases or 'maps' containing pictures of the body's organs, and cells, and are
used in health care professionals' curricula. Similarly to McGrath (2002),
Birke (1999) uses the term 'reading' in regard to pictures of the biological
body: they 'have to be read' (p. 74), and one must 'learn to read the inside'
(p. 71). One must learn how to abstract, to move from the particular to the
universal, to compare, and to 'render the image into universal form' (Birke
1999: 59). Novice students learning microscopy
do
see something in the
microscope, but:
it is rather that they do not know
how
to see, how to interpret and frame
whatever lines and colours fi ll the fi eld of the view, how to distinguish
the 'real' from the artefact, the cell from the air bubble.
(Birke 1999: 59)
