X-rays

“At issue was .. . . the shifting border between judgment and mechanization, between the possibility (or necessity) of human intervention and the routinized, automatic functioning of the technology. . . . Of all the audiences who addressed the medico-legal concept of evidence, perhaps the most active (and distressed) was the assembly of clinical surgeons, who saw in the new X-ray photography a potential legal weapon that could be turned against them in malpractice suits. . . . Above, all , critics challenged the vulnerability of the image to changes in the relative location of the camera, the X-ray tube, and the object under investigation” (Daston & Galison, 110).