Das gezähmte Leben: Computer­basierte Wirkmacht radiologischer Befunddemonstrationen in der onko­logischen Sprechstunde

Computer-Based Power Structures of Radiological Demonstrations in Oncological Consultation

Abstract

With the help of computer technology, radiological examination results have undergone a drastic change since the 1970s – they evolved from diffuse, difficult-to-interpret X-ray projections to digital representations that people beyond the medical profession can understand in their anatomical meaning. Techniques such as X-ray tomography, magnetic resonance and nuclear medicine, the basics of which had been researched over decades, only became clinically effective with the use of computers. Radiological image material is now also demonstrated to patients in medical consultations thanks to their easy digital availability. In long asymptomatic courses of formally incurable diseases, these images are occasionally the only manifest aspect of the disease. In their pointed graphic effect, which is rooted in digital reconstruction and presentation and seen in historical retrospect, has been optimized solely to facilitate medical interpretation, the images are able to convey an incorporation of pathological findings into the physical experience. As a result, digital images as artifacts shape the asymptomatic phases of serious diseases, which are becoming longer and longer due to better therapies. This development is complementary to a picture by Philipp Ariès, who saw an openly communicated socially experienced death eventually turn into an assimilated, tamed death in the beginning of the 18th century. Following his description of death as wild in its medicalization and its associated social taboo of the industrial age, at this point a similar perspective on life should be taken instead. Using clinical examples, the aim is to investigate whether the computer, through the power of perceptive, predictive digital radiological technologies, participates in assimilative pro- cesses in formally incurable illness situations in which the everyday physical experience of a (supposed?) health is much closer than a fatal illness, thus in a sense not assimilating illness or death, but downright taming life itself.