MyGlasgow News

A book about the development of the diagnostic ultrasound - a Glasgow innovation – has been published.  Imaging and Imagining the Fetus is written by Professor Malcolm Nicolson, Professor of History of Medicine at the University and John E. E. Fleming, who worked as an engineer with Tom Brown to develop the first untrasonic scanner to go into production.

Malcolm Nicolson and John Fleming relate the technical and social history of ultrasound imaging—from early experiments in Glasgow in 1956 through wide deployment in the British hospital system by 1975 to its ubiquitous use in maternity clinics throughout the developed world by the end of the twentieth century. Obstetrician Ian Donald and engineer Tom Brown created ultrasound technology in Glasgow, where their prototypes were based on the industrial flaw detector, an instrument readily available to them in the shipbuilding city. As a physician, Donald supported the use of ultrasound for clinical purposes, and as a devout High Anglican he imbued the images with moral significance. He opposed abortion—decisions about which were increasingly guided by the ultrasound technology he pioneered—and he occasionally used ultrasound images to convince pregnant women not to abort the fetuses they could now see.

Imaging and Imagining the Fetus explores why earlier innovators failed where Donald and Brown succeeded. It also shows how ultrasound developed into a "black box" technology whose users can fully appreciate the images they produce but do not, and have no need to, understand the technology, any more than do users of computers. These "images of the fetus may be produced by machines," the authors write, "but they live vividly in the human imagination."

Imaging and Imagining the Fetus, The Development of Obstetric Ultrasound is available in hardback.  For more information, http://jhupbooks.press.jhu.edu/ecom/MasterServlet/GetItemDetailsHandler?iN=9781421407937&qty=1&source=2&viewMode=3&loggedIN=false&JavaScript=y

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First published: 13 March 2013