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The medical body of the 19th century was a body of renewed physicality, whose vision was a productive capacity which could be regulated by processes analogous to those governing the flows of capital and labour. Vision emanated from the body, and was subject to conditions imposed upon it by the body.
In Jonathan Crary's work on vision, power, and the creation of the observer in the early 19th century1, his articulation of vision as lodged within the body, as opposed to an objective, ordered vision external to it, established the conditions of possibility for the institutional manipulation and domination of the body, of which Foucault speaks in Discipline and Punish.
In the late 20th century, the medical gaze of surveillance and normalisation is typified by a canvassing and pacification of the body as a terrain of potential infiltration and malignancy. McKenzie Wark has described the manner in which perceptual technologies common to medicine and the military create a second, abstract, body: a mapping of coloured and coded data morphologically analogous to the first body. This terrain is scanned for signs of malignancy imperceptible in the first body.2
Upon entry to this exhibition, one sees a quote which indicates that the similarities between the diagnostic methodologies of the medical and the military are not merely coincidental.
... Since the rise of the cellular hypothesis-that cancer is a mysterious, tumorous condition of localized origin- the medical establishment has sanctioned only three methods of treatment: surgery, radiation, and chemotherapy. On a larger scale, these are precisely the three major weapons (search-and-destroy, bombardment and chemical warefare [sic) utilized militarily against social problems (i.e. political and economic insurrections) in VIetnam and other parts of the