Solveig Jülich

Media as Modern Magic : Early X-Ray Imaging and Cinematography in Sweden

This article examines different forms of intermedial relations between x‐ray imaging and cinematography in the media culture around 1900, mainly in a Swedish context. With the Stockholm Exhibition of 1897 as one of the focal points, the author argues that these two media were linked in their production, distribution and exhibition as well as in the envisioned audience reception. More specifically, the aim is to show how collaboration and competition between these new media can be understood in relation to nineteenth‐century discourses on ‘modern magic’. Through the marketing in other media – illustrated books, articles, caricatures and advertising in the press – an expectation was fostered that the x‐ray apparatus and the Cinématographe could perform operations that once had been thought of as impossible or magical. In a similar manner, the media industries, scientific performers and entrepreneurial showmen launched x‐ray imaging and cinematography as something new, strange and even exotic. In the end it was the cinema that proved to be more successful in inventing new ‘magical’ tricks, and x‐rays were appropriated for other, medical services, but through innovative uses, the moving x‐ray pictures could once again become new and fascinating.

History of participatory media : politics and publics, 1750-2000

This book argues for a historical perspective on issues relating to the notion of participatory media. Working from a broad concept of media – including essays on the 19th century press, early soun ...

Lennart Nilsson’s Fish-Eyes: A Photographic and Cultural History of Views from Below

This article examines the Swedish photo-grapher Lennart Nilsson’s wide-angle imagery in its production and circulation contexts from the mid-1960s to the 1980s. It focuses in particular on a sample ...

Colouring the human landscapes : Lennart Nilsson and the spectacular world of scanning electron micrographs

This article explores the relationship between Swedish photographer Lennart Nilssons scanning electron micrographs and commercial culture from the late 1960s to the mid-1980s. By retracing how Nilssons micrographs of the internal structures of the human body were made, circulated, and received, its aim is to investigate three aspects of this relationship. First, it highlights how the complex and sometimes conflicting interplay between the photographer and various actors in science, industry and the media shaped the pictures and their trajectories. Second, it analyses the processes used to colour Nilssons original black-and-white micrographs in relation to tendencies in the media and the advertising industry during this period. Third, it examines what motivated Nilsson and his collaborators in their use of colour and also the critical debates concerning the spectacular and commercial qualities of his pictures. In the concluding section, the implications of this analysis for the history of the objectivity of scientific images is discussed.

A historical argument for regulatory failure in the case of Primodos and other hormone pregnancy tests

The drug Primodos and other hormone pregnancy tests (HPTs) remained on the British market for about a decade after they were first implicated, in 1967, as a possible cause of birth defects. In November 2017, an expert working group (EWG) set up by the Medicines and Healthcare Products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) concluded against such an association. However, it was explicitly ‘not within the remit of the EWG to make formal conclusions or recommendations on the historical system or regulatory failures’, a situation that has left many stakeholders dissatisfied. Placing the question of a teratogenicity to one side, this article takes a more contextual and comparative approach than was possible under the auspices of MHRA. It asks why an unnecessary and possibly even harmful drug was allowed to remain on the British market when a reliable and perfectly safe alternative existed: urine tests for pregnancy. Based on archival research in several countries, this article builds a historical argument for regulatory failure in the case of HPTs. It concludes that the independent review which campaigners are calling for would have the potential to not only bring them a form of closure, but would also shed light on pressing issues of more general significance regarding risk, regulation and communication between policy makers, medical experts and patients.

In the light of media : Mass miniature radiography surveys for tuberculosis in Sweden, c. 1940–1970

This paper aims to highlight the medical and medial relationships that were established and negotiated through the mass X-ray surveys for tuberculosis in Sweden from the early 1940s to 1970. In particular it focuses on three interrelated aspects. Firstly, it shows how mass miniature radiography was developed through the pairing of old X-ray technology with new photographic technology. Secondly, it demonstrates how the survey campaigns enabled connections between medical and media institutions and professional groups. Thirdly, it discusses how the mass surveys helped to create and mediate relations between doctors and patients, experts and lay people, sick and healthy people, participants and objectors. In conclusion, it argues that these three aspects together are crucial if we wish to understand the mediatisation of the medical sphere as well as the medicalisation of everyday life during the twentieth century.