From the potent properties of X rays evoked in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain to the miniaturized surgical team of the classic science fiction film Fantastic Voyage, the possibility of peering into the inner reaches of the body has engaged the twentieth-century popular and scientific imagination. Drawing on examples that are international in scope, The Transparent Body examines the dissemination of medical images to a popular audience, advancing the argument that medical imaging technologies are the material embodiment of collective desires and fantasies--the most pervasive of...

Generating Bodies and Gendered Selves examines the textured interrelations between medical writing about generation and childbirth - what we now call reproduction - and emerging notions of selfhood in early modern England. At a time when medical texts first appeared in English in large numbers and the first signs of modern medicine were emerging both in theory and in practice, medical discourse of the body was richly interwoven with cultural concerns.

Through close readings of a wide range of English-language medical texts from the mid-sixteenth to the early eighteenth...