This chapter examines how different kinds of images have been deployed in disparate medical contexts to render long-term fatigue—an elusive and quintessentially intangible pathological physical and mental condition—visually communicable and epistemically explorable in the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. First, by focusing on two disparate case studies, we intend to perform in-depth analyses of select context-specific uses of images in mediating the production and dissemination …
Read moreThis chapter examines how different kinds of images have been deployed in disparate medical contexts to render long-term fatigue—an elusive and quintessentially intangible pathological physical and mental condition—visually communicable and epistemically explorable in the mid-twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. First, by focusing on two disparate case studies, we intend to perform in-depth analyses of select context-specific uses of images in mediating the production and dissemination of biomedical knowledge of fatigue in different historical contexts. Second, through such an unusual juxtaposition of two mutually independent case studies, each written by a separate author, we want to exemplify the heterogeneity of context-specific functions that diverse images have fulfilled in the medical discourse on fatigue. To achieve this twofold aim, we selected two case studies from different historical periods and medical contexts, characterized by different conceptual framings of fatigue and the use of different types of images, whose separate analyses necessitated employing two different methodological approaches.
