CT Suite: The Work of Diagnosis in the Age of Noninvasive Cutting

摘要

Barry F. Saunders's CT Suite is about professional cultural workings of the medical-imaging device called computed tomography (CT). It is a book about the cultural logic at work in radiological diagnosis, about the cultic dimension of the social rites of medical imaging. It is also about the continued historical presence of the cadaver, dissection, and the detective work of diagnosis in contemporary medicine. CT Suite builds on ethnographic participant observation in a clinic in 1996-97. Across six chapters, the book denaturalizes the visual power of CT by scrutinizing the many social practices involved in the interpretation of images. In particular, it addresses how CT practitioners set scans (anatomical pictures) in relation to various texts, data, other images, and notions of normality.