Images and self-evidence
pp. 95-113
in: Heiner Fangerau (ed), Handbook of popular culture and biomedicine, Berlin, Springer, 2019Abstract
Representations of medicine in pop culture often have an iconographic character. Thereby, they set in a double sense of self-evidence. They represent on the one hand, self-evidently a medical context, and on the other hand, they act to transport or at least illustrate self-evident medical pieces of knowledge. In this contribution, we will give an overview of the current research about the visual (non-linguistic) self-evidence. Different strategies that serve the production of self-evident images in medicine are described and their representation in popular culture will be displayed on the basis of three case studies. The case studies include (a) the use of curves to record and display physiological movements, (b) radiology as a tool to produce images from the interior of the body and (c) neuroimaging techniques that were designed to illustrate the working brain.