Natural History of Man and the Politics of Medical Portraiture , 2006, Art Bulletin (original) (raw)
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Drawing Damaged Bodies: British Medical Art in the Early Twentieth Century
Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 2018
This is a preprint of an accepted article scheduled to appear in the Bulletin of the History of Medicine, vol. 92, no. 3 (Fall 2018). It has been copyedited but not paginated. Further edits are possible. Please check back for final article publication details.
William Orpen: Looking at Bodies in Medicine and Art
This paper is concerned with the intersections between medical diagnostic looking and artistic evaluation in the art of William Newenham Montague Orpen (1878-1931).1 Orpen, who is best known as successor to John Singer Sargent as the foremost Edwardian portrait painter, produced numerous pictures of doctors, artists and connoisseurs looking. They testify to the fact that in medical diagnostics, as in the production and evaluation of artworks, specialised visual skills are required. This is nowhere more the case than in his 1901 painting 'A Mere Fracture' of a doctor examining a fractured leg in a domestic interior. Through the close, ‘anatomical’ looking of the doctor, Orpen pictured the primacy of vision in his realist project, which emphasised both close observation of surface detail and knowledge of anatomy. In this way the painting is emblematic of the artist’s complex engagement with the nature of visual examination in both medicine and art, a theme to which Orpen would return repeatedly throughout his career.
'Art, antiquarianism and early anatomy', BMJ Medical Humanities 40, 2 (Dec 2014), 97-104
Medical Humanities, 2014
Discussions of the early relationship between art and anatomy are shaped by Vasari's account of Florentine artists who dissected bodies in order to understand the causes of movement, and the end of movement in action. This account eclipses the role of the study of antiquities in Renaissance anatomical illustration. Beyond techniques of presentation, such as sectioning and analytic illustration, or a preoccupation with the mutilated fragment, antiquarianism offered a reflection on the variant and the role of temperament which could be adapted for anatomical purposes. With its play on ambiguities of life and death, idealisation and damage, antiquarianism also provided a way of negotiating the difficulties of content inherent in anatomical illustration. As such, it goes beyond exclusively historical interest to provoke reflection on the modes, possibilities and humane responsibilities of medical illustration.
The Gentleman Artist-Surgeon in Late Victorian Group Portraiture
In this article I consider the ways in which group portraits of surgeons, a genre associated with inscriptions of corporate membership and institutional authority, reflected the complex and at times contradictory status of surgeons during the late Victorian period. Group portraits from this period offer a diverse range of representations of surgeons -from middle-class professional to hygiene reformer, scientist to cultured gentleman -all of which worked against the popular conception of the surgeon as manual labourer and bloody carpenter. In particular, the emergence during the period of the gentleman artist-surgeon, exemplified by the celebrity surgeon and amateur artist Henry Thompson (1820Thompson ( -1904, signalled a new incarnation of the surgeon and offered an alternative to both the stereotypes of the surgeon as manual labourer and the surgeon or middle-class professional. But there were complexities and contradictions that beset the identity of the gentleman artist-surgeon, and these will be considered with reference to Thompson's own novel, Charley Kingston's Aunt (1885).
The early-nineteenth-century artist, anatomist, and teacher Sir Charles Bell saw anatomy and art as closely related subjects. He taught anatomy to artists and surgeons, illustrated his own anatomical texts, and wrote a treatise on the use of anatomy in art. The author explores the connections among visual displays representing human anatomy, aesthetics, and pedagogical practices for Bell and a particular group of British surgeon–anatomists. Creating anatomical models and drawings was thought to discipline the surgeon’s hand, while the study of anatomy and comparative anatomy would discipline the artist’s eye. And for Bell, beauty made drawings into better pedagogical tools.
Bloodlines: Circulating the Male Body Across Borders in Art and Anatomy 1780–1860
British Art Studies, 2021
Art and anatomy in the nineteenth century were intimately linked maledominated professions, where hand and eye united. These activities were key interconnected sites of male bonding, of growing professional identity formation, and of the construction of modern masculinity. For the Irish-born Maclise brothers, Daniel and Joseph, the bonds were also fraternal: brothers living and working together in London throughout their lives with a shared passion for life drawing, anatomy, and the human figure in pictorial representation. Dissecting, in particular, the lithographic drawings of surgeon-artist Joseph Maclise (1815-1880) in Richard Quain's The Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body (1840-circa 1844) and his own Surgical Anatomy (1851, 1856, and 1859), this essay tracks the lifeblood of the anatomical arts circulating around the networks of specialists with whom Maclise was associated, from Cork and the capitals of Scotland, England, and France, across the Atlantic to Philadelphia and Boston. At a time when travel was far slower, surgeons, artists, and printmakers travelled long distances in search of greater learning, the flow returning to generate new knowledges in its places of origin. Like the Grand Tour, these journeys often lasted far longer than a passing tourist visit, at times entailing months or years of professional study and work-as in Joseph Maclise's anatomy studies in Paris. The anatomical work, and its representation in images and texts, was thereby circulating in shared ideas, practices, teaching, books, manuals, atlases, art, and crucially, given that the (primarily) white male body was the "universal" body in medical anatomy, in shared ways of seeing and constituting the human (male) body. Authors Acknowledgements I would like warmly to thank Keren Hammerschlag for her kind invitation to contribute to this major British Art Studies project, and for her comments on my text. My thanks also to the two BAS reviewers for their close reading plus their astute and helpful feedback. Marcia Pointon generously read an earlier version of my paper and gave me invaluable advice on it. I am very grateful too, to the incomparable William Schupbach at the Wellcome, who answered all my obscure queries during library lockdowns in 2020; Michael Sappol was also very kind in answering my questions and sharing his research. Irish medical historians Davis Coakley and Clive Lee have also generously shared their research and networks with me, without which my knowledge especially of the Cork anatomy fraternity would be greatly impoverished. The BAS project editors, especially Baillie Card, and Maisoon Rehani who has organised the illustrations, deserve my grateful thanks for their hard work, patience, and invaluable input. I am also indebted to all those individuals and organisations that supplied the illustrations.
The Epic Anatomy of the Body. New Historical-Humanistic Approaches to the Medical Image
Codrul Cosminului, 2022
In current historiography, the interdisciplinary study of history, visual arts, and medicine is no longer a novelty. The last decades have brought challenging works to the attention of researchers, highlighting, in particular, affinities between the three fields. Offering a different dimension to medical problems and overcoming chronological, geographical and disciplinary limitations, such books and studies broaden the horizon of knowledge, revealing the effects of medicine on society from multiple perspectives: cultural, political, economic, religious and intellectual. As the innovation in medicine is increasingly accelerated, and the results of scientific research in the field of biomedicine are challenging (often generating ethical debates and moral dilemmas), works like Anatomy of the Medical Image: Knowledge Production and Transfiguration from the Renaissance to Today offers the opportunity to assess the changing role of medical practices over “longue durée” of history. They contribute to a better understanding of the past and a more profound and fuller interrogation of the present. The thirteen contributions in the volume edited by Brill under the auspices of the Clio Medica series show how the historical approach, the visual material and the medical subject can work together