Medical Visions: Producing the Patient Through Film, Television, and Imaging Technologies

Abstract

In her opening paragraph, Ostherr describes Medical Visions as ‘a book about medical visualizations and the new worlds they bring into being for both doctors and patients’ (p. 3). What follows is a fascinating exploration of 120 years of medical images created by parties as diverse as the healthcare industry, documentary makers and artists, which have raised questions about the identities and roles of doctors and patients, including about the doctor's gaze, whether mediated by technology or challenged by technology-driven patient empowerment such as ‘e-patient’ movements. In particular, Ostherr analyses the evolution of the clinical gaze through medical films, TV programmes, advertisements, medical imaging technologies and online networks to consider the question of how technologically mediated vision has shaped medical education for specialists and health education for the general public. She takes a multidisciplinary approach, drawing on film and media studies, science and technology studies, American history and global health. Although the stories in Medical Visions chart the experience in the US, they nevertheless have relevance, and find reflection, beyond this. Ostherr concludes her Introduction with her hope that Medical Visions will contribute to existing discussions of the relevance of broadly defined, multimedia textual analysis to the multidisciplinary field of biomedicine by demonstrating how robust analysis and understanding of medicine's visual culture can help both doctors and patients navigate and optimise their experience of the increasingly medicated world we all live in (p. 24).1