Itemizing the technological present
This article is part of: Commonplaces
Cabinets of curiosity are at the historical heart of scientific and medical enterprises. They remind us that the modern effort to know, and perhaps understand, always departs from the same shore: collection. Such cabinets were described as curiosities (“wunder”) because they also elicited affects of amusement, surprise, amazement, desire, and disgust. For example, the Kunstkamera in St. Petersburg, …
This article is part of: Commonplaces
Gut feeling. Go with your gut. Gut of the problem. By default I’m a gut guy. At the age of thirteen I was diagnosed with acute Crohn’s Disease. For the next ten years I was borderline incontinent. Then I had a small bowel occlusion that resulted in complications precipitating a near death experience after which several feet of festering small …
This article is part of: Commonplaces
I sat waiting for my turn to see the doctor. I watched as women went in and out. I listened as names were called. Eventually, there were only two of us left in the waiting room: another young woman and I. Quite unexpectedly, she started speaking to me – no one had said anything during the entire hour or more …
This article is part of: Commonplaces
Discussing a failed arctic expedition of the late 1700s, Keith Gessen reminds us that the team had wooden boats, wildly inaccurate maps, and “didn’t know what a vitamin was.”[i] Now, four Nobel Prizes later, we are in the 101st Year of the Vitamin. The word, derived from “vital” because vitamins are required for life, yields 104,000,000 Google search …
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My head aches. Not with the “good ache” in your biceps the day after lifting weights, that dull feeling of warm achievement that signals the regenerative growth of torn muscle fibers. Like a sore bicep, my aching head is also a muscle over-flexed from hours of heavy lifting (read: reading). But this particular hurt is not regenerative. It is damaging. …
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Fukushima: from the coasts of India’s Tamil Nadu to the halls of the German Bundestag, the word now stands for danger and deception, contamination and vulnerability. Every day brings new distress. Cesium-137 clings tenaciously to the soil and buildings of northeastern Japan. Radioactive fish promenade across the Pacific. Over 40% of children examined by the Fukushima Prefecture Health Management Survey …
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Environmental researchers have recently documented that American rivers and lakes are filled with highly medicated fish – doped on a wide spectrum of antidepressants. It turns out that Americans are treated for anxiety, depression, and fear at such high rates these days that a huge amount of un-metabolized pharmaceutical-grade chemicals simply flush through their bodies every day, out into sewers, …
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Put the gaze in motion—sweep it across a field: take it all in, without pause. Binoculars along the horizon. Or if not the gaze, sweep with an energy that can lend itself to vision. Ultrasound, across the ocean bottom. X-rays, around a body. Electron beam, across a sample. Or sweep with the Archive’s electronic eye: inventory gun, across the barcode. …
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January, 2525. Below ground. Chemical fumes and white walls. A barely functional weblink with the following webpage, read to the sound of steady beeping:
The science of reading the electrical activity in the cerebral cortex is called encephalography; the material representation of the different electrical folds of the brain an encephalogram.
A biosignal like no other, the EEG is used …
This article is part of: Commonplaces
Reflex. The images themselves seem to come reflexively. The clinician’s percussion hammer bouncing off of the knee. A startled infant. I hadn’t thought much about the idea of the reflex. At least not since the fifth grade, when I had unsuccessfully tried to condition four white laboratory mice to respond either to the sound of a bell or a flashing …
This article is part of: Commonplaces
This is a conversation between Nick and Zoë. They cultivated this conversation especially for Commonplaces. Nick is an activist and writer who lives on ventilation. Zoë is an anthropologist and friend who does not.
***
nick: They say that the fundamentals of life support and CPR are ABC (Airway, Breathing and Circulation). I say that my A and B are …
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One almost feels sorry for the human these days. After a heady flight toward near divinity, the figure has tumbled, Icarus-like, down from the intellectual firmament to a posthuman sea of forms, forces and flows large and small. Even anthropology (the very citadel of anthropos!) is now awash with multispecies mashups, circulating microbes and wandering genes, not to mention zombie …
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While training in psychiatry, I frequently heard mental-health practitioners refer to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual (DSM) as our profession’s “diagnostic bible.” The DSM, of course, is the text produced by a cabal of psychiatric experts that defines the parameters of mental illness and, by extension, mental health. It textually conveys the now commonplace assumption that psychiatry works through systems …
This article is part of: Commonplaces
I barely slept the night before my first day of fieldwork in the OR. As a kid I had accompanied my brother to the emergency room and watched a surgeon remove shards of glass from his lower legs. The removal wasn’t bad. But when the suturing began, I got dry mouthed and over-warm and nearly fell out of my plastic …
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The brain speaks the truth of the self. I imagine it would not be controversial by now to suggest that this general formulation indexes a set of implicit constraints that have to some significant degree underwritten and informed the historical ontology of the modern self since the nineteenth century.
But let me be clear: to assert that the brain speaks …
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Early anthropological experiments depended on tables to hold their equipment steady, at eye level, and off the ground. Photographs from the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to the Torres Straits in 1898 make it clear that tables played an important role in the psychological experiments conducted by the anthropologists.
A table is a technology that stabilizes people and things in space …
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The petri dish was made for separation. It was developed for culturing microorganisms while separating them from airborne contaminates. As part of its ability to make separations between the contaminated world outside and the uncontaminated world inside, the dish also assisted in separating individuals from disease. These days, it’s getting harder for petri dishes to maintain these separations.
Julius Richard …
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My friend Dr. Muñoz makes his own bleach. He uses salt, water, and electrodes to render sodium hypochlorite. To do this, he has colonized a small space in a garage-cum-storage unit nestled on the grounds of the Managua health center where he works. His bleach-making is ad-hoc and off the books. Dr. Muñoz doesn’t get extra money or time from …
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Every sensation is a question, even if the only answer is silence. [i]
Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari
When Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. delivered his introductory lecture on anatomy and physiology to students at the Massachusetts Medical College in the fall of 1847, he noted that for the patient, thanks to ether, “the fierce extremity of suffering has …
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Recently the Minister of Health of Trinidad and Tobago explained the problem of chronic disease in the country: “The population do not listen to the message we are sending out – love yourself, eat right, exercise and decrease your sugar and salt intake.”[i] The exhortation to “love yourself” in a disciplined approach to health suggests the curious place of …
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Guatemala, 2013.
Someone had drawn two footprints on green construction paper and taped it to the back of a box of cornflakes to show patients how to stand. In one corner the person had written out the word Nutrición; in another, perhaps because the impending task was at once ridiculous and frightening, the person had placed a sticker of the …
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Adéline chided me for going all the way to town to buy a “natural” mosquito spray that—while hardly effective—I continued to slather on my body every time we jogged the wooded paths of the Forêt Vatable in Martinique. She had gotten used to my declining to borrow her Pyramid brand “Repel 100,” a 100% deet formulation that she swore by, …
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“Tolerance” never made it into Raymond Williams’ Keywords, a rare mistake: it should have been a tempting subject for his critical sensibility.[1] By the late-eighteenth century, the word often had come to substitute in English for the older “toleration,” meaning forbearance, patience, and indulgence of the opinions of others. Later, physiologists took up its connotation of the endurance …
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On January 17th 2014, Catherine Eagles, a federal judge for the Middle District of North Carolina, struck down as unconstitutional a portion of North Carolina’s 2011 Women’s Right to Know Act. The portion in question would have required abortion providers in the state to perform an ultrasound and display and describe the images presented to every woman seeking an …
Science, Medicine, and Anthropology