A history of science focusing on how different media are deployed to construct and communicate expert knowledge would need to concede that no single medium—writing, imaging, or other types of notation or recording—dominates this process. But neither can we expect all media to function similarly. Moving images function differently than still photographs or graphs or the written word. The pressing historiographical questions, then, are: how do these media function? What difference does the choice of medium make to the researcher? These are not questions media scholars often ask with regard to scientific imaging, nor questions historians of science often ask with regard to media; most discussions treat all media as equally transparent conveyers of a message without considering how the formal properties of the medium might affect our interpretation of any message—or the researchers’ own understanding of their object of study. To approach these questions, this presentation will compare the use of film to the use of television in medical schools and scientific laboratories after WWII. Through an examination of archival sources, it will demonstrate that researchers were indeed sensitive to formal properties, such as the density, grain, and clarity of the image, as well as to the different capabilities of the technologies. This paper argues that researchers had their own implicit or explicit theories of medium specificity, which help to explain historical patterns of media use and therefore should heighten our sensitivity to the formal specificity of media in the history of science and medicine.
