"I consider X-ray technology as a pervasive and perverse cultural apparatus—one that confounds the distinctions between the public and the private; specialized knowledge and popular fantasy; and scientific discourse, high art, and popular culture. As an aesthetic and a set of conventions, the X-ray is both gothic and modernist; as a medical tool, it has been regarded as a technique for both destroying and saving lives; and as a model of scientific knowledge, is has revealed more about the old iconography and modern visual paradigms to generate new configurations of the body. Finally, the X-ray is a major technique of twentieth-century knowledge and power." (Cartwright, 1995, p. 107)