Mapping nerves. An investigation into the vitality of an image

This article proposes that one possible version of writing the biography of a scientific image might be to populate it densely with meaning by writing about the relations it entertains with things that themselves lie outside of it, thereby supplying it with a specific mode of existence, infusing it with vitality and thus transforming it into a potential object of biographical endeavour in the first place. Consequently, the article commences and ends with the same image that in the beginning appears to be a more or less meaningless photograph of a male left hand on which a bizarre drawing is superimposed. In the course of the article, this image is reanimated: the medical questions that led to the experiment in whose context the image was produced, as well as the applied experimental strategies and techniques, are closely investigated; in relating it furthermore to a series of other images and by reflecting its epistemic status, the very same image in the end of the article appears as something completely different: a part of a map of the cutaneous nervous system of a male subject around 1900.