Micrografías interrogadas: Una aproximación a la cuestión de las imágenes técnicas en la historia de las ciencias en la Argentina (siglos XIX y XX)

Abstract

In recent decades, there has been a renewed historiographical interest in the practices, knowledge, spaces and materiality of technical aspects of sciences, which explores the role played by images in diverse scientific practices has increased internationally (which is framed, in turn, within more general historiographical perspectives that, in social sciences, had already begun to consider images as sources of the same hierarchy as textual ones). From this perspective, this article provides reflections on the implications of considering the visual dimension of the history of science to rethink new historiographical forms, assuming that images are not merely illustration and, on the contrary, they worked and function in the observation and recording of data, in the exchange and corroboration experimental, in the formulation of theories, in the visual communication of results, in the development of new instruments, in the reassignment of uses of old instruments, among others. The empirical study of these reflections is focused on the technical, political and social issues that arose around the development of optical and electronic microscopes, and the microscopic images generated by them from some cases linked to experimental medicine in Argentina in the 20th Century.