X-ray

Author: Dr. Nicole Lobdell Series: Object Lessons

Paperback

X-ray reveals how an invisible beam of light transformed science, art, culture, and history—and how we never looked back.

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Summary

X-ray reveals how an invisible beam of light transformed science, art, culture, and history—and how we never looked back.

Description

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.

X-rays are powerful. Moving through objects undetected, revealing the body as a tryptic of skin, tissue, and bone. X-rays gave rise to a transparent world and the belief that transparency conveys truth. It stands to reason, then, that our relationship with X-rays would be a complicated one of fear and fascination, acceptance and resistance, confusion and curiosity.

In X-ray, Nicole Lobdell explores when, where, and how we use X-rays, what meanings we give them, what metaphors we make out of them, and why, despite our fears, we're still fascinated with them. In doing so, she draws from a variety of fields, including the history of medicine, science and technology studies, literature, art, material culture, film, comics, gender studies, architecture, and industrial design.

Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Critic Reviews

Nicole Lobdell’s X-Ray delightfully turns the table on Dr. Roentgen’s magical rays, revealing all. Fittingly, we are shown a hidden truth that was in front of us the entire time: the X-ray is not simply a marvel of science, medicine, and technology—it has shaped our art, language, politics, and culture. Through flowing prose and extensive research, X-Ray exposes the invisible rays’ larger impact on man (and Superman), inviting us to confront a thing that is mysterious and objective, a source of healing and harm, and a giver of insights into bodies foreign and familiar. Lobdell’s narrative delivers a brand new perspective—with none of the radiation. Benjamin Schwartz, Assistant Professor of Medicine (in Surgery), Columbia University, USA, and cartoonist, The New Yorker
Lobdell pens a clear, big picture of a surprisingly many-sided subject. The result is a glowing and penetrating examination of the importance, meaning, and influence of X-rays on not just health but all facets of life. Journal of Medical Humanities

About the Author

Nicole Lobdell is Assistant Professor of English at DePauw University, USA. She is the author of Bithia Mary Croker: Short Stories (forthcoming) and co-editor, with Nancee Reeves, of H. G. Wells’s The Invisible Man (2018).