The Banana Peel Project

In recent months, The Banana Peel Project has increasingly focused on the way the body and its illnesses are understood in contemporary technocultures.  This turn reflects not only my own growing appreciation for the power and pervasiveness of modern biomedicine, but also the increasing attention being paid to the biological sciences in popular culture.  News coverage, popular science books, and our daily lives are filled with images of the body, and every day we are surrounded by friends and experts who simultaneously implore us to take advantage of the benefits of biomedicine and caution us about their seemingly infinite side-effects.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been trying to move out of my own head and into some of the ostensibly more corporeal forms of existence which I tend to forget over the course of the arduous academic year.  So if there’s a notable lack of new postings at The Banana Peel Project, it’s in anticipation of a flurry of new thoughts that (I hope) will come when the books are opened once again.

So as a nice boost in the middle of my end-of-summer posting hiatus, I’d like to point out a new BBC miniseries that might be of interest to some readers.  “Blood and Guts: A History of Surgery” is a very well done set of minidocumentaries chronicling the history of bloody slicing and dicing from antiquity to the present day.  From the gory details of the transorbital lobotomy to the latest in open heart surgery and brain imaging, this show is not for the squeamish.  You can stream the episodes from the official BBC site, although they remove the episodes after a few days.  I imagine that perhaps if one wanted to take a look at a torrent site like btjunkie or The Pirate Bay, one might be able to get the episodes that way.  Perhaps.

Now I’m off to the woods.