Self-evidence and conclusiveness of visual representations in medical diagnostics during the late 19th and early 20th centuries using the example of diseases of the urinary tract

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Heiner Fangerau
• Subject Area: History of Science
• Term: from 2012 to 2017
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 227086191

The problem of how physicians argue for scientific self-evidence plays an important role in medicine. Self-evidence legitimizes medical actions for diagnostic or therapeutic procedures. However, literature on the contextualization of the complex concept of self-evidence in medical diagnostics as it developed during the 19th and 20th centuries is missing. The proposed project analyzes visual strategies of creating self evidence during this period: which visual or data formats were put forward to produce self-evidence? How did contemporaries discuss questions of self-evidence in diagnostics? Especially different characteristics of display formats and their function as self-evidential evidence will be focused. These formats will encompass a great variety from technically induced images (from the inside of the body) to synthesized visualizations (graphs, tables etc.). A crucial point will be the analysis of the relationship between technology and self-evidence. Which technologies, instruments and apparatuses were used in medical diagnostics, which visualizations did they produce and how did these images insinuate self-evidence? In addition to a reconstruction of what is seen as self-evident during the period in question the entire discourse about producing and accepting self-evidence shall be examined. Figurations of self-evidence will be analyzed on the basis of central categories such as objectivity (in different kinds), visualization styles, the development of communication forms about self-evidence and physicians‘ disposition for „directed seeing“. Diagnostics of diseases of the urinary tract will serve as an exemplary object of investigation, because diagnostic practices in this field combine examinations of body fluids far from the body (e.g. uroscopy), examinations of the skin and diagnostic procedures entering the body (endoscopy, radiology).

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• Participating Person: Professorin Dr. Irmgard Müller