Turned inside out

After nine weeks of pregnancy I was allowed a peek into my belly. The ultrasound waves penetrated my skin and bowels to uncover a territory of my own body hitherto unknown to me. This mapped territory would have remained unknown to me in fact without the explanations of the obstetrician. The waves penetrated deeper still, also through my unborn baby's skin (or is it just membrane?) to record a tiny beating heart. Actually, I hardly discerned anything in the irregular, grayish, and black images on the monitor. But the weakly blinking light of hope was accompanied by the sound – reinforced by doptone – of an eager heartbeat of some 140 beats per minute. The image had an alienating effect on me. As if I could look through myself into the future and beyond my own life: ‘If all goes well with my baby,’ I thought, ‘this heart will perhaps beat for as many as eighty years. Mine will have stopped beating by then for a while already.’ As a mere link in the succession of generations I was lying there, looking at the black and white proof of life, with a blob of cold gel on my belly. I saw life, heard it beat, but did not (yet) feel it.

Although we take it for granted that we can see the inside of our body, this has only been possible since 1895, when Wilhelm Röntgen invented X-rays. This technology marked the beginning of a new anatomy. If beforehand one could analyze dead bodies only, Röntgen's invention made it possible to look into living bodies. Until the 1950s, medical imaging would still be in its infancy, however, and only few people actually got the opportunity to see what is inside of their body. From the 1960s, medical imaging technology has exploded, and now it will be hard to find anyone in Western countries who has never had a medical image made. There is a range of sophisticated machines that rely on various techniques to uncover the inside of the body: ultrasound, endoscopy, and all sorts of scans such as MRI and PET.