Fixing the Image

Ultrasound reached Phnom Penh around 1990, as socialism was fading and the city was recovering from two decades of war and turmoil. It first arrived through humanitarian programs and later spread through a private medical sector. Today many clinics offer scans on the promise of clearer diagnoses and better prenatal and general health care.

Drawing on years of fieldwork and archival study, Jenna Grant examines why medical imaging exerts such a pull on urban life in the city. She situates the technology within longer histories, treating it as an instrument of postcolonial modernity, and she considers how seeing underpins expert diagnosis in both biomedicine and Theravada Buddhism. Ultrasound provides a sense of stability, and it stirs longing and enjoyment, especially among expectant mothers. Grant's central term, "fixing," carries several meanings at once: mending, steadying, and the dose of something one craves. Through it she shows how scanning becomes bound up with care in some settings and with neglect in others.

The book also proposes a way of studying technology through the material qualities of particular devices, here the production of images and the porousness of the human body. Grant argues that images work as a physical medium that connects patients to one another, to their doctors, and to their own bodies.