HIST 249 Lecture Notes - Lecture 21: Saddle Nose, World War I, Feedback
The Technological Fix in Medicine
• Reading:
o
Course pack:
o Thomas Schlich, “The Technological Fix and the Modern Body: Surgery as a
Paradigmatic Case,“ 71-92
• Assignment #2 last minute thoughts:
• Use secondary literature to help enhance your work/findings from primary source
•
Technological Fix in Modern Medicine
• Continuation of the surgery lecture
• Surgery influenced by societal factors - modern surgery is part of society in a lot of
ways
• Surgery - being used as a technological fix, often about health problems, body
structure
• For medical problems
• And for problems that were not medical in the first place
• General phenomenon in modern medicine
•
Case examples:
A. Trauma Surgery:
• Political problems > surgical ones
• Surgery of accidents
• Body > place to solve that problem
• Political origins: invisible
• Example - discussions in 1930's Germany
• Martin Kirschner - 1937
• Opposed to speed limits for cars, don’t want to be limited in our development
• Bring together 2 discourses: traffic policy and trauma surgery
• Trauma surgery - motorization of Germany & to catch up with other countries
• Autobahn (no speed limit)
• Volkswagen
• Liberal approach to speeding
• Problem with this --> car accidents
• Nothing helped solve these accidents
• Surgeons were re-discovering accident surgery's for themselves
• Accident insurance - traumatology - solved the solution of the accident
problem
• Societal compromise
• Today - accidents are naturalized, acts of nature, become like diseases
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2
• Makes it look like the increase in road accidents look like a law of nature
• Medicalization
• Road accidents become medicalized
• Traffic accidents - being just the problem of the individual, and away from
traffic policy
• Bare this with their body
• Individual body - negative consequences where this shows up…
• The body also becomes the place where the problem could be dealt with
• Compromise exists everywhere…
• Invest in damage repair for society
• Surgery is an important part of this process
• How surgery (and other technology) are involved in decisions of how we
live
• This is not obvious today, they become invisible
• Claim that surgical intervention - scientific solution
• As a technological fix…
B. Psychosurgery
• Attempt to cure mental disorders by surgical intervention
• Involved in the BRAIN
• Seen in the lecture on Asylums and lack of treatment, overcrowding
• Attractiveness of technical solutions
• Strange behaviour > medical problem
• If someone behaved in deviant, strange ways there were multiple ways to
interpret that
• Religious issue, could be dealt in the family, in institutions
• No experts for strange behaviour like we have today
• Need to understand strange behaviour as disease (it is medicalized)
• Mental illness > brain > fix brain
• BRAIN
• This behaviour can be localized in the body
• Localized in the brain
• Once mental illness is located in the brain… it is logical to want to fix the
brain
• Paradigmatic operation: lobotomy
• This was done in the 1930's-1950's
• Lobotomy
• Cutting fibers in the prefrontal cortex
• Structural concept of madness in mental disease
• Cutting this surgically
• Cruel method
• Lobotomy - Impressive short term results
• Seemed to offer a solution to a problem
• Problem for history
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