Locating Medical Television. The Televisual Spaces of Medicine and Health in the 20th Century
On the one level, they have represented medical and health places: consulting rooms, hospitals, the home, community spaces, public health infrastructures and the rest. As television-producers have represented these places, there has been an interaction with the developing capabilities of television technologies and grammars. Moreover, producers have borrowed their imaginaries of medical and health places from other media (film, photographs, museum displays etc.) and integrated, adjusted and reformulated them into their work. But medical television has also worked spatially in the political sense of being broadcast internationally, at the national level, and locally, interacting with differing regimes and polities. It may include regional and local broadcast as well as straddling public-private divides, including pay television, advertisement and audience measurement. At both levels, medical television has served to represent familiar and unfamiliar locations and medical modes back to patients and medical or health practitioners.
Following Broadcasting health and disease organised with Wellcome Collection in 2017 and Tele(visualing) Health organised with London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine in 2018, this third conference on medical television in the framework of the ERC funded BodyCapital project and in a joint venture with the Science Museum London intends to locate medical television more precisely – it intends to engage (medical) TV history with recent questions concerning the relevance of space within and beyond national borders.
With comparative approaches, or under consideration of (sometimes contradictory) local, national and global developments, the conference intends to address the following themes:
* Locating medical television within global, national or local markets, politics and polities.
* Locating medical television as a means of new globally influenced medical communication in the public sphere from publicizing medical breakthroughs and frontier research to disseminating public health messages
* How television has represented medical location, and how that has depended on available technology and technique.
* Locating medical television within health communication and mediation including fairs, museums and collection displays.
* Comparisons with and transitions to other medical media, including exhibitions and displays, and film.