ABSTRACT
THE VIRTUAL GESTELL If both public and scientific interest in the VHP is driven by fascination with the preternatural possibilities of cyberspace, biomedical interest is also driven by a set of practical concerns. The VHP represents the most recent solution to an old medical problem, the problem of bodily opacity. The entire anatomical enterprise, and its long historical project to bring medicine under the sign of science, is organised around the visualisation of pathology in the corporeal interior. Anatomical medicine concerns itself with the identification of pathology as interior topography, which must be visually encountered in order to be fully known, a geography which demands optical traversal. As Foucault, writing of enlightenment clinical anatomy, puts it,
Pathology is not a generalised state of being, a disease which afflicts the whole system, but a local and readable lesion, a mappable topography whose logic is spatial and visual. Hence the opacity of the body’s exterior surfaces and tissues, its deflection of light and its material self-enclosure present one of medicine’s persistent epistemological problems. This problem has been addressed by a succession of visual technologies which try in various ways to anatomise the body-dissection within the anatomical theatre itself, the anatomical atlas, the multifarious endoscopes which traverse the body’s lumens, the radiograph and the more recent kinds of computed vision already mentioned. Each of these technologies transluminate the body in some way,
open it to the incursion and projection of light or some other radiant spectra, so that its tissues become readable and interpretable as projected images, traces on a page or screen. Each technical innovation seeks to correct the ‘deficiencies’ of the kind of vision it replaces-the CT scan, by making a depthless optical ‘cut’ through the body’s tissues it seeks to correct the superimposition of depths found in the radiograph, for example.1
