A Visual History of Medicine

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Open any medical journal or textbook, go to the doctor's office and look at the walls, or do an internet search for the little pain that's been bothering you for the last few days. You'll notice that medical pictures, diagrams, and computer-generated images are everywhere. This may seem obvious, and it may seem natural that physicians and scientists need to learn to "read" complex visual information. Science and medicine were not, however, always so visual. How did the medical field become so thoroughly image dependent? What kind of information—whether obvious or hidden—have medical images conveyed in the past up to the present? What roles have images played in the spread of Western medicine? And what can such images tell us about the communities and societies, including our own, in which they were created? In this class we will analyze images related to nature, the body, and medicine, covering the middle ages through the twentieth century. It is both a history of medicine seen through the lens of visual techniques and technologies developed over time, as well as a history of visual representation itself as revealed through the history of medicine.