| Abstract: | The text begins a line of dialogue between feminist and epistemological work in the life sciences using a case study of the concepts ‘foetus’ and ‘baby’ in diagnostic ultrasound and parental discourse. The case material illustrates the multiple, coexisting registers of clinical discourse and the significance of cultural intertexts, the insertion within biomedical discourse of concepts from other cultural domains. It follows that biomedical rationality lacks the autonomy that Canguilhem argued it has; rather than giving itself its own laws, biomedical rationality is heteronomous, receiving and using cultural intertexts from many and varied domains. |
