Digital Opacities: Remediating the History of Medicine

Abstract

Medical science’s long history of extractionism—especially in the United States from Black and Indigenous communities—hangs over the libraries and digital databases which knowledge workers generally work. So much of medicine’s history depends on the remains, biomater and biometrics stolen in the process of research. This paper presents a digital humanist intervention to this problem, through the description of the development and implementation of a custom built, open source digital dissertation template—the Opaque Online Publishing Platform (OOPP).

The platform, built for a dissertation that interrogates the moments when human subjects were made into research objects (specimens) in the fight against tuberculosis, gives knowledge workers a set of tools to make their primary evidence opaque. Borrowed from postcolonial philosopher Eduard Glissant, opacity refers to an individual’s personal refusal to be ingested into western knowledge practices. Expanding this notion, the OOPP enables scholars to apply opacity back onto the bodies of exploited subjects reproduced in photographs, illustrations, and case studies so commonly found in biomedical research publications. The opacity practiced in the dissertation platform speculatively reimagines what medical history might look like if medical knowledge divested their exploitative objects.