The Body Within: Art, Medicine and Visualization

The central question of this volume is, whether present day medical visualisation techniques like ultrasound, endoscopy, CT, MRI and PET-scans mark a significant shift in the experience of bodily interiority. These visualisation techniques enable not only medical researchers and practitioners to look inside living bodies without literally opening them, but their inhabitants as well. This new experiential possibility may have profound implications for the ways in which the relations between ‘body’, ‘self’, and ‘world’ are configured, both on the level of cultural discourses and practices and on the level of individual experiences. The contributions to this volume investigate the body within as an historical, social and cultural construct, constituted in the interchange between technology, knowledge, representation and media.

Brill’s Studies on Art, Art History, and Intellectual History, vol. 3