A Visual History of Medicine

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

Pictures, diagrams, graphs, and (more recently) computer images are ubiquitous in modern medicine. Depictions of disease are indispensable for medical education, training, and reference, although this reliance on images is a rather recent development. Visualization is also indispensable in medical research, both for communicating evidence, theories, and experiments to other researchers and physicians and for conveying this knowledge to the public. But understanding precisely how images work—both the obvious and hidden things they do—can be surprisingly difficult, and throughout history important questions have been raised concerning the usefulness, and the dangers, of relying on visual depictions to understand the body and disease. In this class we will investigate images related to the generation or transmission of knowledge about nature, the body, and medicine, from the middle ages through the twentieth century. It is both a history of medicine told through the lens of the visual techniques and technologies used over time, as well as a history of visual representation itself as revealed through the history of medicine. Among other things we will address the following questions. What are the material and technological factors underlying visual depictions in medicine over time? What can the images we examine tell us about the communities and societies, including our own, in which they were created? In what ways do images serve as intermediaries between nature and those investigating it? What about between physicians and patients? What roles have images played in the spread of Western medicine over time?