The Presentation of Medical Knowledge

This paper interrogates the visual and material culture of intrauterine contraception (IUC) in the UK, focusing on NHS patient-facing materials and the recurring depiction of IUCs within a disembodied uterus. I argue that ostensibly neutral diagrams actively produce public understandings of the uterus and reproductive responsibility. Drawing on the work of Margrit Shildrick and Barbara Duden, I situate IUC diagrams within a lineage of medical visualisations, positioning them as an evolution from disembodied gestational imagery which frames the female body as a vessel, privileging the uterus and its contents. I argue that contemporary IUC diagrams reconfigure the uterus: the device occupies the uterus to prevent conception, transforming the organ into a site of technological intervention and temporarily managed reproductive potential. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s ‘medical gaze’, I examine how IUC diagrams render the uterus hypervisible while the body is erased, enacting anatomo-political disciplining. Their diagrammatic composition—floating, clean, and aestheticised—demonstrates how normative reproductive subjectivities, heteronormative temporalities, and ideals of reproductive citizenship are reinforced. The paper uses the diagrams to explore IUCs from a corporeal-material perspective, highlighting their occupation of the uterus as both embodied and symbolic. Finally, building on sociotechnical scripts and feminist cyborg theory (Akrich; Haraway; Oudshoorn), the paper concludes by analysing how IUCs, as implanted devices, configure users, anticipate compliance, and mediate gendered performances of reproductive labour. By exploring the entanglement of visual culture and corporeal materiality, this paper aims to advance critical medical humanities debates on reproductive governance, bodily autonomy, and the politics of implanted contraception.

Battle imagery and war metaphors are often used in descriptions of immune functions, and this is hypothesized to shape understanding of the immune system. Remarkably, this framework remains a persistent phenomenon within medicine, during epidemics, and throughout interpretation of disease. Scholars have emphasised this persistence of military metaphors in medicine, despite growing understanding of the multitude of immune functions like cleaning of cellular debris, bacteria or viruses as well as supporting tissue repair and development. Traditional metaphors could limit understanding and therefore cause many of these functions to remain invisible to the researcher. Though, an extensive mapping and visualisation of metaphor in scientific publications is lacking. This study builds on Ludwik Fleck's theory of how scientific facts are formed through thought collectives. It quantifies and visualises concepts from metaphorical frameworks in thousands of scientific articles, focusing on immunology journals and those in general life sciences as a comparison. Using high-resolution clustering methods to quantify and visualise textual embeddings, this study reveals new types of metaphorical frameworks embedded in the articles. The results indicate an overlooked, yet vital feature of scientific research: the metaphorical structures that thought collectives use and how they inform research.

How does literary form intervene in the politics of medical knowledge? This paper proposes that the literary avant-gardes of early twentieth-century Europe constitute an unexpected site from which to explore this question — one that requires rethinking the scientific horizon of literary modernism beyond the psychoanalytic paradigm.

Dominant accounts of the avant-garde — Surrealism and Dadaism in France, Italian modernismo, British modernism — have long identified psychoanalysis as their primary scientific matrix. This paper recovers a different genealogy, in which the neuron, rather than the unconscious, serves as the organizing figure of a shared epistemological moment. Drawing on Goldmann's structural homology and Bachelard's epistemological rupture, I argue that the neuronal theory developed by Golgi, Cajal, and Sherrington constitutes a largely overlooked epistemological horizon for avant-garde literary theory — one whose formal counterpart is the valorization of fragmentation, discontinuity, and shock.

This homology is not merely formal. At the same moment, pseudoscientific theories of the "native psyche" — rooted in colonial psychiatry and racial anthropology — were mobilizing brain science to legitimize imperial expansion. This paper asks whether avant-garde texts engaged not merely with neuroscience as aesthetic resource, but with the broader discursive field in which scientific authority over the psyche and colonial power were mutually reinforcing. In doing so, it explores whether their refraction of neuroscientific discourse may constitute a counter-discourse against the scientistic legitimation of colonial power.

Combining close reading, discourse analysis, and archival research across France, Britain, and Italy, this paper repositions avant-garde literary form as a critical medical humanities practice — a mode of engaging, contesting, and remaking medical knowledge from within aesthetic production.