Bodies without borders

Abstract

The movie Fantastic Voyage (1966) is not an innocent science fiction fantasy but a trope that concurrently underlies the development and implementation of a particular medical imaging technique: the endoscope. Sketching the past, present and future of endoscopy, this article advances the broader argument that medical imaging techniques and media technologies are developed concurrently. The endoscopic gaze - the look from within the body - has gradually become a pervasive mode of corporeal inspection, not only in high-tech medicine, but in television and other popular media as well. But what are the implications of this ubiquitous endoscopic gaze? How may innovations in endoscopic technologies - including the latest virtual techniques - affect doctors’ and patients’ concepts of corporeality? And do these innovations, in turn, affect our collective appreciation of surgical intervention and its consequences? Persistent myths of transparency and non-intervention have prevailed in both the production and popular dissemination of the endoscopic gaze, redefining our norms and expectations concerning the perfectibility of the body as a physical container.