The Invisible Female Patient: The New Reproductive Technologies Discourse in the Medical Literature: Abstract: >The idea that infertility is mainly a technical problem, which can be remedied with the new reproductive technologies, has become paramount to popular media coverage of these new procedures. Over the past decade, studies of the popular press have generally found that the news media promote assisted reproduction as a technological marvel and champion doctors as miracle workers. The media usually anchor these procedures with two main actors: the doctor and the fetus, thus positioning the patient (mother/father) outside the realm of the medical experience. Few studies have focused on the portrayal of reproductive arrangements in the medical news media and even fewer projects have concentrated on doctors as news writers. This study proposes to direct attention to physicians’ communicative skills. Using textual analysis, the project examines medical representations in professional periodicals such as the New England Journal of Medicine, the British Medical Journal and the Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology. Findings demonstrate that as news writers, journalists and doctors practice similar reporting instruments related to news sourcing, news worthiness and story dramatization. Physicians pack their medical linguistic practices with professional jargon, almost entirely isolating the outcome (fetus/baby) from the sources (mother/father). Finally, examples are provided to illustrate how medical jargon can follow proposed journalistic techniques to create a “patient-friendly” inclusionary vocabulary when writing about female patients.< Link
monochrom is an art-technology-philosophy group having its seat in Vienna and Zeta Draconis. monochrom is an unpeculiar mixture of proto-aesthetic fringe work, pop attitude, subcultural science, context hacking and political activism. Our mission is conducted everywhere, but first and foremost in culture-archeological digs into the seats (and pockets) of ideology and entertainment. monochrom has existed in this (and almost every other) form since 1993. [more]