Bodies in Flux
Scientific Methods for Negotiating Medical Uncertainty
Medical professionals, scientists, and patients have long grappled with the dubious nature of medical "certainty" regarding diagnosis, treatment, and prognosis of disease states. Constructing certainty requires reductions and deductions. It requires us to take what we know now and make best guesses about what will be. We try to make peace with medical uncertainty by monitoring symptoms, modeling risk, and looking toward evidence. But bodies in flux always outpace the human gaze. With research, technologies, and patients themselves constantly changing, how do practitioners ultimately make decisions about care? "Bodies in Flux" looks at the many ways humans coproduce medical knowledge. Each chapter investigates one specific scientific method for negotiating medical uncertainty in cancer care, including evidential visualization, assessment, synthesis, and computation. The cases pull back the curtain to show doctors deliberating over the best ways to treat a patient, the FDA holding drug hearings to decide dosage, researchers synthesizing studies into evidence-based standards, and pharmaceutical companies designing genetic tests for consumers. Christa Teston concludes by advocating for an ethic of care that embraces human bodies' flux and frailty.
About the Author
Christa Teston is assistant professor of English at The Ohio State University.
Reviews
"Teston takes new materialist theory to the scene of medical diagnosis, clinical trials, and deliberation, grappling with unruly bodies as emergent and medical practices as indeterminate and contingent. A fascinating, potent study that should be required reading for transcorporeal humans, who find ourselves dwelling within – not isolated from – flux".-Stacy Alaimo, author of "Exposed: Environmental Politics and Pleasures in Posthuman Times"
"In one of the most compelling accounts to date, Teston's 'Bodies in Flux' demonstrates quite strikingly how evidence is produced as much as it is analyzed, and that rather than avoid uncertainty, we can and should embrace the contingency of bodily materialities. The book is a must-read for humanities scholars, biomedical researchers, physicians, and patients looking for alternative ways of thinking about and, indeed, actively practicing the uncertainty and potentiality of embodied being".-Kelly E. Happe, author of "The Material Gene: Gender, Race, and Heredity after the Human Genome Project"
