TITLE
Medical Archives and Digital Culture: From WWI to BioShock
AUTHOR
Suzannah Biernoff
PUBLICATION
Medical History
YEAR
2011
ARTICLE TYPE
Academic
FROM THE ARTICLE
I started thinking about these questions when I discovered that case photographs from First World War medical archives had been used in the computer game BioShock. It is probably symptomatic of the game’s commercial success that so few academics have heard of it. Over four million copies of the game have been sold, BioShock II was released in February 2010, and Universal Studios has plans for a film. Without giving the plot away, this is a spectacularly gory game, and some of the most frightening encounters are with genetic mutants known as ‘splicers’. It is these sub-human monstrosities that bear an uncanny likeness to Tonks’ portraits and the case photographs of the same men housed in the Gillies Archives at Queen Mary’s Hospital in South London.
GAMES MENTIONED
BioShock
ALTERNATE LINK
Reprint @ PubMed Central
PRINT AVAILABILITY
July 2011 (Volume 55, Issue 3)