Response to Scientific Looking, Chapter 9
Image from Northwestern
The author of this article makes a powerful case for the idea that culture informs science, which in turn informs science, and so on and so forth.
I was familiar with how the camera changed how artists and scientists view their respective disciplines, and I was also familiar with the philosophy of eugenics, but I had never before read anything that so clearly illuminated how the camera provided such widespread means of spreading that philosophy.
I’ve always found it interesting to reflect on the claims science has made over the years, and on their cultural power. This chapter certainly presents a lot to think about in both of those respects. This chapter also provoked some questions in me:
What are the current social assumptions that scientists have today, and how do they inform their research?
The problem with this question is that it points to what I will call the “Post-Modern Conundrum”. It is easy to see the overt racism that guided much of the early use of photography to study human morphology because of our own chronological distance. As a result, one is lead to my earlier question, yet it cannot be answered, because as we see from this analysis it is only possible to detect biases and the effects of culture on science in hindsight. This leads to the development of psychological tension in the post-modern scientist and thinker:
How is one to know if one’s own research and thought is negatively influenced by ones own’s culture? Or framed another way:
How will the scientists of one hundred years from now view the science we are doing now? Will they comment on how inhumane it was? Will they have some sort of advanced knowledge about humanity that we did not even realize we were stifling by means of our scientific inquiry and cultural arrangement?
Another thought I had while reading this article was in regards to the contrast presented between photography and ultrasound. The author takes the position that these ultrasound images have power because their data is presented visually instead of in charts or graphs, a assertion that I believe has been frequently demonstrated. It is possible to take one step further back from this idea, and leap further into post-modern thought with the realization that both of these devices are simply collectors of electromagnetic waves. We cannot see these waves, and these devices present to us visual representations of one way or another of these waves, but not the waves themselves. From this lens, it is possible to see that all these devices, photographs, ultrasound, MRI, PET are not in fact making visible the invisible but really translating something invisible into something that can then be interpreted through vision, whether the things being interpreted are graphs or images.
Regarding the commentary on human anatomy and the cultural coding of dissection and Bodyworlds, I realized that the author never pointed out one of the implicit messages of all of these disciplines, that truest knowledge of the human body can only be obtained when it no longer functions as it did in life. This implies that the animating force of life, what each human experiences as living is so complex that only in its absence can anything definitive be said about it.
Finally, the latter part of the article reminded me of the trans-humanism movement. Which is thought-provoking to say the least. They even have a political party, to which I have provided the above link. 
Image form Wikipedia