Biomedical Visions

Theoretical and scientific inquiries into the benefits and drawbacks of visualization, illustration and visual culture in the field of medicine

In this multi-authored volume, a diverse cast of artists and scholars reflect on the dialectical role of image-making across the biomedical sciences. Scientific images can legitimize patient experiences and perceptions and convince doctors in the search for a diagnosis, treatment or cure. But they can also be deceptive messengers, generating new forms of epistemic uncertainty and increasing rates of misdiagnosis, unnecessary interventions and healthcare inequalities. In explicating this duality, the authors mobilize perspectives from visual studies of science, art history, science and technology studies, sociology and patient advocacy with historic, contemporary and original artworks and infographics. Biomedical Visions bridges epistemology, medicine and artistic practice to make sense both of how biomedicine looks and how we might look differently at biomedicine, in the past and in the future.