Art and Medicine

3.0 credits

This course explores the ways in which art and visual culture have shaped knowledge, communication, and cultural representations of medicine, health, and the body. It brings tools from visual culture studies and art history into conversation with the health humanities and the history of medicine, exploring topics such as anatomy, dissection, and objectivity; physician portraits; the ethics of medical photography; and the symbiotic relationship between contemporary art and health. The course is organized largely by medium; we will be looking at prints and printmaking, objects, paintings, illustrations, photography, film and medical imaging, and a range of contemporary artworks. Art and medicine is a two-way street: we will explore how these tools for analyzing and understanding art and visual culture can help those in healthcare professions ethically and culturally, and how studying medicine and the body in art can help us to understand our world, our health, and our bodies better. Because of the scope of this topic, we will largely focus on the modern period and on Western art and medicine, while bringing in examples from diverse groups and time periods. We will also be exploring the breadth of what “visual culture” can mean.