Iarrive home with my X-rays and a copy of my medical notes. The X-ray films reorganise my body, the living flesh of my arm, so that only the hard white lines of the surgeon’s metalwork are really visible (see Figure 1). Screws jut out from a shining metallic motorway in a series of dead end streets before the motorway curves into a meccano-like structure made up of yet more screws and plates – the complex roundabout of an entirely mechanical elbow. The roundabout rests on what looks like an ordinary domestic screw – not the sort of object you’d choose to have impaled in your arm. I stare at the films, mesmerised by the penetrating white-on-black, that magic medium which enthralled its early scientists. The X-rays have represented my body in a deeply symbolic way. Not only has the flesh of my arm completely gone, but even the bones appear ethereal, insubstantial, in some way fundamentally flaky, perhaps just as the bones of ageing women are supposed to be. Possessing such images of the interior of one’s body, and sharing them with others, is the ‘supreme postmodern gesture’, notes Lenore Mandelson, who emailed to friends her surgeon’s photographs of her inflamed radial nerve. ‘Objective’ images of the body are the most definitive answer possible to questions about one’s health.

The surgical notes talk about various parts of my arm as ‘quite comminuted’, using sentences such as ‘the oseotomy was corrected’ and ‘the olecranon was osteotomized and turned superiorly’. ‘Comminuted’ I figure out, with the aid of a dictionary, means ‘to reduce to minute particles; to pulverize’. But the other stuff in the notes is a foreign language, a language of insiders, like the freemason’s handshake. I look at my arm when the bandages are taken off, as you would at an oddly