The Medicine & Its Objects Workshop Presents:
“Embodying Dose: Sense, Stress, and the Uncertainty of Dosimetry”
Stephanie Palazzo | PhD Candidate, Comparative Human Development
Discussant: Lorenzo Granada | PhD Student, Anthropology
*Wednesday, March 9th from 4:30-6:00pm CT*
Via Zoom Only
Please email Anna Prior (priorah@uchicago.edu) to RSVP and receive a copy of the pre-circulated paper and the Zoom information.
ABSTRACT: This dissertation chapter maps the various and contested attempts to make sense of the extent of the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant’s 1979 accident and its health consequences. In particular, it examines the modes through which radiation became visible in the bodies of my contemporary and historical interlocutors in the form of radiogenic injury even as government reports systematically rendered those effects further invisible through appeals to accident-stress and a reliance on uncertain metrics. After Three Mile Island experienced its partial meltdown, government and industry sources were able to capitalize on inconclusive short-term data to champion the safety of the plant. The result was that some residents living around TMI believed that the true effects of the accident were never uncovered in labs, statistics, or peer-reviewed studies but in their physical bodies. This chapter traces the public health debates following the accident and places them alongside the stories I gathered from my interlocutors and archival research. In doing so, I aim to bear witness to the anecdotal as a form of evidence in its own right even in (or perhaps better put, especially in) a multi-exposure world where cause and effect can be difficult, if not impossible to establish.
