| “CT Suite” names the nexus of rooms in the Hospital where CT (Computed Tomography) scans are made and read. It also names a suite of practices and rituals.; CT, a founding technology in medicine's “imaging revolution,” has changed the contours of medical diagnosis. CT is heir to the legacy of the morphologic lesion, “seat and cause of disease,” which began with pathoanatomy and its clinical correlations in the 19th century. But CT has enabled the search for the lesion to unhinge from its historical gold standard, the cadaver. This unhinging is bound up with redistributions of relations among cutting (tomo), writing (graphein ), and observing-and various other craft-practices of tomographic diagnosis. CT is a technology for sectioning bodies; it is also a technology which sections the diagnostic cultures of the Hospital, redistributing work of medical judgment. The cloistered character of CT interpretation has not diminished popular enthusiasm about medical imaging.; The history of CT's revolutionary situation includes Radiology and the Hospital, but also histories of visuality and representation (photography and cinema), exhibitionary complexes (museums and international expositions), embodiment and death (war and taxidermy). These aid a critical inquiry into CT's present: ethnographic investigation of CT craftwork, across the entire Suite-from Scanner Room to Reading Room to Conference Room to Archives-at a University Hospital (in 1996–97).; Suites of practice which comprise CT diagnosis help constitute particular kinds of entities: inert patient bodies, labeled film folders, printed reports, paired slide carousels, specialized experts. Registering, indexing, reading, testifying, exhibiting are among the techniques that construct these objects and relations among them. CT interpretation still requires negotiation of ambiguity; viewbox witnessing still lends itself to theaters of intrigue that derive from the traditional pedagogical ritual of the Clinical-Pathological Conference. But new chains of custody, through which embodiment is transformed into evidence, and insights into expertise, do not bind either the patient-subject or the cadaver the way they once did. Examination of a full suite of tomographic practice may facilitate appreciation, and mitigate the tendency toward fetishization, of the image of the doc before the viewbox—the evidence-based medic. |
