In The Connector, Alexandra Middleton examines how the frontiers of experimental medical science are always the everyday lived experiences for patients and their families and communities. Drawing on fieldwork and interviews conducted in Swedish labs and clinics that develop neuromusculoskeletal protheses, as well as in the homes of patients enrolled in clinical trials as they live with these new forms of prosthetics, Middleton shows how patients’ sensory experiences and domestic worlds become key spaces of scientific knowledge production that extend well beyond their visits to the lab. Through storytelling that centers the patients’ embodied knowledge and labor, along with the scientists who work closely with them, Middleton depicts how “connection” entails inhabiting the liminal space between ideation and materialization, a space punctuated not only by breakthroughs and breakdowns, but the slow work of the everyday. The Connector critically examines where biomedical innovation, scientific discovery, and the “cutting edge” come from in ways that foreground the importance of the domestic spaces in which experimental science take place.

Alexandra Middleton is Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Copenhagen.

Prelude: Only a Machine  ix
Introduction  1
Part I. Producing and Sustaining a Connector
1. Domestic Lived Science  21
2. Experimental Labor  49
3. The Fourth Bottleneck  77
Interlude 1. Limited Edition  99
Part II. Living and Dwelling with a Connector
4. Phantom Signals  107
5. Reverse-Engineering Touch  151
6. Sense Making; Meaning Making  151
Interlude 2. Lunar Thai  171
7. Flickering Embodiments  175
8. Breakdown  207
Conclusion  225
Epilogue  235
Acknowledgments  237
Notes  243
References  249
Index  267