| Abstract: | In my essay, I analyse surgical and radiological practices of how the blood flow is being explored, rendered visible and treated. For this I use material of my ethnographic research, which I conducted in the operating theatres of interventional radiology at the University Clinic of Radiology/General Hospital in Vienna. I am particularly interested in notions of invasiveness and how they are permanently transformed in this clinical area. Continual inventions of new technologies in surgery as well as in radiology lead necessarily to a decomposing of what terms like invasive, minimal- and non-invasive mean. However, the meanings of invasiveness for patients and radiological personnel are shifting – this notion is crucial – because it marks a cultural and epistemic turn in medicine, which is already far advanced. In the operating theatres of interventional radiology, surgical and digital imaging proceedings melt into one another and transform the integrity of the patient' body through particular ways of staging and through a specific choreography between the physicians' hands and eyes. |
