Man-machine Metaphorical Couplings in Electrocardiographic Theory and Practice

Western medical sciences have been under the scrutiny of sociologists and anthropologists for a long time. Social scientists have provided valuable insights into the social aspects which help make some claims more scientific than others while at the same time showing that changing vocabularies could have a major social impact. Researchers like Emily Martin (2001) or Susan Sontag (1978) have focused on the scientific and popular language that is in use when talking and thinking about certain medicalized aspects of the human body such as bodily functions and diseases. By deconstructing the meaning of the words found in medical textbooks, everyday conversations and many other instances they have argued that science is built on strong metaphors which have become so entrenched in present reality that their metaphorical function passes unobserved allowing them to act like cognitive scripts with a great influence on what individual human beings experience when confronted with embodiment (Csordas, 1999). The paper is concerned with electrocardiography, a science which investigates the workings of the human heart in order to identify abnormalities in the cardiac rhythm. Starting with writings coming from the beginning of the 20th century when the practice was invented and perfected and ending with present day medical textbooks and scientific articles, the paper presents a periodization of the metaphoric language associated with electrocardiography and the human body. In the beginning the human heart was seen writing its own story through the electrocardiograph, but nowadays images talk about TV cameras registering from multiple angles the game that the body is playing. The principal argument is that medical science is based on metaphoric thinking that relate man and machine, the relation being biunique and that the analysis of its vocabulary can help discover how both body and machine are constructed in the social imaginary.