Abstract

The inner body is simultaneously familiar and foreign to most people--we experience its continuous workings every day, though are not always conscious of them. Medical technologies such as the endoscope have allowed physicians to extend their eye into this territory of the closed inner body, alive and in motion. More recent technological advances have been made in the production of high-quality digital images via a camera-like device integrated into the endoscope. This evolution in the technology moves it beyond medical exploration and technique and into being a technology of mediated representation, where images of the inner body represent not only a medical perspective, but the more complex world of the body as a system within broader, diverse cultural contexts. "The body," and medically accepted representation of a common, homogenous physiology, becomes many bodies that present in many different ways. The digestive or gastroenterological system in particular is as an example of universality and bodily centrality while at the same time has qualities specific to each individual. It is a tangible way of bringing the world into our bodies and our bodies into the world. Much like the study of how information relates to knowledge and power, we can gather surface information (images), collate that with other known data, and come to conclusions. These images and their contexts connect to a continuum of knowledge and information about not only human biology and medical science, but to how specialized discourses are communicated within wider discourses, specifically within popular culture.