Material Cultures and Medical Artifacts

Despite extensive work on the history of medical instruments, the material turn has been slow to arrive in the history of medicine. Paradoxically, the materiality of medical objects and their practices is inseparable from their function. Designed to enact and control the violation of corporeal and psychological boundaries and autonomy, these objects, in turn, embody assumptions about the actors who use them and the bodies they are used upon. The four papers in this panel contribute to the growing field of material cultures studies in the history of medicine. Ranging from nineteenth-century anatomical models to mid-twentieth-century psychological tests, late twentieth-century diabetes management apparatus, and contemporary medical museum exhibition strategies, they illustrate the diversity and potential of material culture studies in the history of medicine and a variety of approaches to studying medical artifacts. Central to all is an investigation of the ways that material medical artifacts and the practices that surround them communicate knowledge that cannot be expressed in other ways, whether implicitly through embodied social hierarchies and user assumptions, or actively, through intentionally engaging users in object-mediated dialogues. As these papers show, medical objects are not only interfaces that mediate and structure relationships between actors, but, through their physical-boundary transgressing nature, they are effect-generating actors themselves.