[Sci-tech-public] STS Brown Bag Lunch Talk by Isabelle Dussauge, January 28, 12:00

[Kris Kipp]

Please join us next Friday, January 28, for an STS Brown Bag Lunch talk:

MRI-visions: A high-tech trip into Swedish health care, universities and 
bodies (1980-2000)

Speaker: Isabelle Dussauge, HSSST Visiting Graduate Student

12:00 noon, E51-191

Abstract:

MRI (magnetic resonance imaging) is a complex medical imaging technology 
introduced in most Western countries in the 1980s. By interrogating the 
historical intersections of MRIs fieldsof reality: politics and economy, 
materialdiffusion of technology and expansion of its user domain, ethical 
debates and professional tensions, and ontologies of high-tech images, I 
aim to understand the interrelatedness of these fields, and the problems 
posed by attempting to grasp this complexity.

Studying the history of MRI poses many challenges. The technology itself is 
complex, based on a not always understood interaction between 
radiofrequency signals and the physical chemistry and biology of the body.. 
In Sweden, MRI became an object for debates as medical high-technologies 
get politically problematized. It was introduced at a time when an economic 
crisis in the welfare state led to a broad rationalizing ambition, among 
others a political will to control medical technologyall  of this modelled 
on US experience of similar issues.  A new ethical discourse was also 
emerging that criticized specifically the over-technification of medicine.

At the same time, different professional groups worked on expanding what I 
call MRIs visual field, i.e. the range of bodily phenomena and body parts 
made possibly visible with MRI. However, these different groups attributed 
fundamentally different meanings to MRI-technology, MRI data, MR-images. 
Where physicists and chemists would seedata about fundamental molecular 
processes in the body, radiologists and psychiatrists would 
seemorphological (anatomic) information of clinical value. But what did the 
public research funding agency see? And what happened through the 1990s, as 
MRI became a more and more for-granted part of Swedish health care, and as 
MRI enabled to seemore and more of the body?

During the session, I will outline these intertwined dimensions of the 
history of MRI, and open a discussion on how its complexity may be 
meaningfully approached, hoping for comments and suggestions on how this 
project can be fruitfully continued.
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Please feel free to bring your lunch; we will provide coffee and dessert.



Kris Kipp
Project Manager
Program in Science, Technology, and Society
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
77 Mass. Ave., E51-185
Cambridge, MA 02139
Phone: 617-253-9759
Fax: 617-258-8118
Email: kipp at mit.edu 
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