Ludmilla Jordanova | Durham University (original) (raw)

Papers by Ludmilla Jordanova

Institutions - Themes - Perspectives, 2011

The English Historical Review, 2011

History Workshop Journal, 2010

Historians are only beginning to assess the impact of vast numbers of phenomena being made widely... more Historians are only beginning to assess the impact of vast numbers of phenomena being made widely, easily and cheaply visible, especially on the worldwide web. ‘Phenomena’ might sound vague, but I use it deliberately to evoke the extraordinary scope of what can now be seen, and is relevant in some way to the past and its study. Until the eighteenth century, for example, naturalistic images of human embryos were unknown. In subsequent centuries they became accessible to specialists, and to collectors, such as those who bought, saw, and admired the wax anatomical figures that strove for perfect verisimilitude. Nowadays, everyone in technologically privileged countries has pictures of their own offspring in the womb and the sight of a human embryo is not particularly remarkable. Yet when Life magazine published the famous photographs by Lennart Nilsson of human embryos in 1965, it was a much-discussed event. There was a sense that something extraordinary had happened precisely because what had been hidden from most people was made visible. The internet has exponentially increased such visibility. There are complex histories to be told here, including about notions of gender and family, which have the potential to touch huge swathes of the population now that assisted reproduction is both experienced and discussed in both popular and broadsheet culture. Thus we might quite properly assert that the history of embryology is a suitable subject for public history and that one way of making it compelling to the public is through a website that contains many images of embryos over long periods of time. The website ‘Making Visible Embryos’ does just this, although it does not frame itself as ‘public history’. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, it might be seen as ‘public understanding of medicine’, or indeed ‘knowledge transfer’. This collaboration between the University of Cambridge and one of the world’s most important medical charities was authored, if that is the right word, by Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood and it is certainly designed to be highly accessible. As the home page explains,

The Historical Journal, 2005

The British Journal for the History of Science, 2006

Art History, 1988

Realism, Writing, Disfiguration. On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane by Michael Fried, Chicago and... more Realism, Writing, Disfiguration. On Thomas Eakins and Stephen Crane by Michael Fried, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987, 215 pp., 8 colour plates, 53 b & w ills, £23.95

Science Museum Group Journal, 2021

In the short opinion piece that follows, I try to set out some of my concerns about 'heroism'. A ... more In the short opinion piece that follows, I try to set out some of my concerns about 'heroism'. A number of experiences have led me to a long-term interest in this theme, which comes into sharper focus when we consider its prominent position in many forms of public culture. As a young historian of science, I was taught that hagiography was bad, and that biography was an oldfashioned genre which encouraged an unhistorical approach to the past of scientific knowledge. When working in a history department early on in my career, I was struck by how a colleague's wonderfully researched and written biography was treated as a not particularly serious work by some academics. Then the surge of interest in life-writing happened, and as I was working more on portraiture-the ways in which images and lives had been used to build reputations and forge strong bonds between people with shared interests in science, medicine and technology-it claimed my attention. For several years I taught a Masters-level module on heroism. My students showed me how deeply invested we still are in heroes-a point reinforced in all parts of the media-when they got highly emotional about certain figures, and were frequently reluctant to subject such responses to critical scrutiny. I learned that people associated with warfare and empire-building continue to exercise extraordinary allure, while remaining contentious. Around the same time, I became interested in the vogue for celebrating anniversaries, which often raise tricky questions about what, precisely, is being celebrated, by whom, and with what motives. When writing about portraiture, as I have been doing over the past two decades, the issues around heroisation are inescapable. I recognise that museums, especially those associated with science, are places where these matters are also debated, although in distinctive ways, since their very survival generally depends on public support for their work, and members of the public may indeed have a thirst for heroic figures, which is willingly met by the media in an age of celebrity. 'wrong' in the eyes of many people, I have long been keenly aware that he will never attract the sustained attention given to Charles Darwin (see Figure 2).

Transactions of the Royal Historical Society

Portraits and biographies play a central role in engaging non-specialists with the past, and henc... more Portraits and biographies play a central role in engaging non-specialists with the past, and hence invite careful scrutiny. Major enterprises, such as the National Portrait Gallery in London and the Dictionary of National Biography, in both its original and Oxford versions, provide rich examples for reflecting on public history and on the relationships between types of writing about past times. These issues relate to literature as well as to history, given the prominence of biographies of literary figures, and the role of literary scholars as authors of biographies. Using materials concerning the artist John Collier (1850–1934), the publisher George Smith (1824–1901) and the surgeon James Paget (1814–1899), this article examines the relationships between portraits and biographies and the types of insight they afford. Colin Matthew's innovation of including portraits in the Oxford Dictionary, together with his own scholarship on William Gladstone (1809–1898), including his portra...

Cultural and Social History, 2014

Practising history in a digital age is a complex operation, making it essential that we reflect c... more Practising history in a digital age is a complex operation, making it essential that we reflect critically on its opportunities and challenges not only for research but also for undergraduate teaching, research supervision and public history. One complexity is the highly diverse ways in which digital technology and the internet in particular impinge on our lives. It may be useful to distinguish between information retrieval as in library catalogues, digitized resources, such as those that make large amounts of printed text available, and large projects that offer the possibility of managing data sets of significant size. In addition many museums and galleries provide elaborate websites, which do considerably more than listing opening hours, current exhibitions and travel information. They contain research on artefacts, as well as information about specific items within the collection – both are invaluable for scholarly research. In practice, these are not watertight categories, and it is worth reminding ourselves of the diverse range of behaviours involved when we think about history and ‘the digital’, including blogging and tweeting. We might also take our cue from fields such as historical geography, where reflection on GIS, for example, is well established.1 Indeed, digital culture provides a welcome opportunity for historians to reflect on their relations with a range of other disciplines. A further reason why reflecting on ‘the digital’ is so important is that it might help stem the fragmentation of history as a discipline. Already there is an extensive specialist literature in digital humanities and digital history, which requires a certain level of expertise to grasp fully.2 This specialization is possible partly because most historians are more interested in what digital technology can do for them than in reflecting on its implications. But it is worth laying instrumental considerations aside in favour of a more engaged and critical mode, which is what Tim Hitchcock is advocating. We have to go far beyond the limitations of reading texts in digital form, however. Hitchcock has done his colleagues a service in laying bare some of the economic, technical and political issues embedded in digitization projects. He makes a number of assertions about the nature of contemporary historical practice and its differences from scholarly activities in earlier decades that invite careful consideration. Among the most

The Art Bulletin, 2013

eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California ... more eScholarship provides open access, scholarly publishing services to the University of California and delivers a dynamic research platform to scholars worldwide.

Medical Humanities, 2013

Medicine and portraiture are entwined in intimate and distinctive ways. Thus portraits connected ... more Medicine and portraiture are entwined in intimate and distinctive ways. Thus portraits connected with health and medicine provide promising material for the medical humanities. In order for them to fulfil that promise, a number of issues need to be addressed. The nature of portraiture and the conditions under which portraits are made are fundamental considerations. The metaphorical power of the very idea ‘portrait’, which implies a faithful rendering of specific phenomena, is particularly striking. Then it is worth setting out where medicine portraiture has been practised, by whom and in which media. Modes of visual analysis also need to be considered, including the fields, such as art history, anthropology and visual culture studies, which offer inspiration for the close analysis of images and artefacts. Portraits are ubiquitous in medicine. The Patients' Portraits group of companion papers in Medical Humanities indicates the richness of the materials and the value of the insights they can generate.1–5 They also show how artists working outside medical settings find inspiration in clinical encounters, which generally involve close visual scrutiny. Portraits have been made in many media, and sometimes the same depiction exists in a range of formats and materials. There is no doubt, however, that photography has played a notable role in medicine. Practitioners, like scientists, were early enthusiasts. It is well known that in many 19th-century asylums patients sat for their portraits. Yet interpreting the results is far from straightforward, and even the notion of sitting, which implies voluntary participation, may mislead, since it is difficult to reconstruct the levels and types of coercion involved. In these situations, as in …

History Workshop Journal, 1989

In myth and in history, the medicine of the French Revolution has long been celebrated. Philippe ... more In myth and in history, the medicine of the French Revolution has long been celebrated. Philippe Pinel's loosing of the chains of the insane, and the 'birth of the clinic', that is, the rise of Paris hospital medicine, are the two most obvious examples.' There was, it has been asserted, a medical revolution that took place in France at this time, which enjoyed an intimate relationship with '1789':

Continuity and Change, 2001

... DOI: 10.1017\S0268416002234104 Anna Geifman (ed.), Russia under the last tsar: opposition and... more ... DOI: 10.1017\S0268416002234104 Anna Geifman (ed.), Russia under the last tsar: opposition and sub ersion, 18941917. ... Anna Geifman has no such admiration for the anarchists, whose 'lofty ideals', she says, had by 1908 been 'drowned in a sea of banditry' (p. 108). ...

The British Journal for the History of Science, 2002

The British Journal for the History of Science, 1993

The production of big pictures is arguably the most significant sign of the intellectual maturity... more The production of big pictures is arguably the most significant sign of the intellectual maturity of a field. It suggests both that the field's broad contours, refined over several generations of scholarship, enjoy the approval of practitioners, and that audiences exist with an interest in or need for overviews. The situation is somewhat more complicated in the history of science, since the existence of big historical pictures precedes that of a well-defined scholarly field by about two centuries. Broadly conceived histories of science and medicine were being written in the eighteenth century, when such an all-encompassing vision was central to the claims about the progress of knowledge upon which Enlightenment ideologues set such store. The Plato to Nato style histories, characteristic of the earlier twentieth century, were written largely by isolated pioneers, and while these were used in teaching as the field was becoming professionalized, recent scholars have preferred to co...

European Journal for the History of Medicine and Health, 2021

Paying attention to the senses has been part of historical practice for some decades and has spec... more Paying attention to the senses has been part of historical practice for some decades and has special resonance in the history of medicine since the senses play a central role in all aspects of health care and medical sciences. Both practitioners and patients rely upon them in complex ways. Using a range of primary and secondary sources, this article reflects on what is gained by a focus on the senses, for our understanding of both medicine and our own historical practices. It advocates a generous, expanded understanding of the senses to include, for example, somatic affinity.