Unhooking The Hookworm Chapter 1 Summary

Ostherr also convincingly connects her evidence to her sub-claims and central argument. In Chapter One, Ostherr uses the Rockefeller Foundation’s production of Unhooking the Hookworm as an example of how biopower works—the health film had the ability to either “help viewers imagine unseen worlds and change their behavior accordingly [emphasis added], or alternatively, to reject the visualization as implausible and, therefore, irrelevant to their daily life,” in which case biopower would not have operated successfully upon the viewers (Ostherr 46). Ostherr successfully supports her claim by further stating that Unhooking the Hookworm “illustrates the recurring idea that there are core differences between audiences of “medical men” and the “general …show more content…
In Chapters Five and Six, Ostherr further examines the question of how objectivity and authenticity affect perception of medical visualizations. Cinéma vérité shows, such as Marcus Welby, M.D., which captured direct sound at the location, placed viewers in the position of the patient via the filmmaking style and enabled viewers to adopt a fantasy ideal of the medical physician, who possessed ‘unbiased’ medical authority and used science and superior medical discourse as a weapon against ignorance, bias, and political discourse (Ostherr 159-167). Medical reality TV shows, such as Boston Med and Hopkins 24/7, avoided CGI and used voice-over to invoke “conventions of observational documentary” and create an image of authenticity, even though such TV shows still possessed editorial selectivity and directed and contained viewer …show more content…
First, I would have found Ostherr’s argument to be an even stronger one if she had formally introduced the concepts of biological citizenship and biosociality, which are two essential concepts discussed by Rose and Novas in “Biological Citizenship,” wherein biological citizenship refers to the idea of knowing oneself and maximizing knowledge. Biosocial groups enable patients to come together based on a biological conception of a shared identity (Rose and Novas 6). Ostherr provides an apt example of how medical visualizations promote biological citizenship—albeit she does not use the term—where the more general health films in the postwar era, not the technical films used for physician training, were used everywhere else, “encompassing a wide range of topics concerned broadly with biopower, or the management of the self for the good of society” (Ostherr 81). Biosocial groups can undoubtedly create new worlds for patients and enable them to see their biology differently. E-patients can engage with new ways of knowing as biological citizens by using social media to “actively interpret and produce meaning concerning medical images and information online, and anyone can post his or her own counterimages and ideas,” reversing the top-down model where doctors are the interpreters and authorities on medical images