Anatomy of the Medical Image: Knowledge Production and Transfiguration from the Renaissance to Today ed. by Axel Fliethmann and Christiane Weller (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by:

• Anatomy of the Medical Image: Knowledge Production and Transfiguration from the Renaissance to Today ed. by Axel Fliethmann and Christiane Weller
• Jennifer Wallis

Axel Fliethmann and Christiane Weller, eds. Anatomy of the Medical Image: Knowledge Production and Transfiguration from the Renaissance to Today. Clio Medica vol. 104. Leiden: Brill, 2021. xvi + 311 pp. Ill. $153.00 ( 978-90-04-40675-9).

Anatomy of the Medical Image is an edited collection seeking to explore "the role images play in knowledge formation" (p. 8). The editors note that "even in medical knowledge formations there is not one body but many" (p. 8), and the thirteen chapters that make up the volume consider, among other themes, "the anatomical, pathological, gendered, imagined, and consumed body" (p. 8).

The volume is relatively broad in its geographical scope, a welcome approach, and thematically arranged into three parts. A variety of media are covered, from paintings (Rembrandt's Anatomy Lesson) to photographs (for example, those exchanged between Charles Darwin and psychiatrist James Crichton-Browne during the research for Darwin's 1872 Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals). Other chapters cover physical culture and classical beauty ideals in eighteenth-and nineteenth-century Germany, nineteenth- and twentieth-century medical portraiture, German fin-de-siècle public health posters, microscopy in the Weimar Republic, psychiatric art collections, graphic medicine, and zombie TV drama. An especially interesting chapter is that by Axel Fliethmann on sixteenth-and seventeenth-century accounts of "pathologies of imagination" (p. 58). It is an intriguing chapter, and although it would have benefitted from a greater word count to properly explore the medical and epistemological frameworks of the period under discussion, it is an innovative exploration of images and the conceptualization of the "visual" in medicine.

Some of the strongest chapters are those that focus on discrete networks of production, or individual artists and makers who have been relatively overlooked in the historiography to date. Elizabeth Stephens's chapter on obstetric models is a fascinating exploration of female wax modelers such as Anna Morandi, whose self-portrait in wax (ca. 1760)—depicting her in the process of dissecting a brain—was "explicitly designed to reposition the female body in anatomical research and practice" (p. 80). The striking and aesthetically pleasing waxes of male artists like Clemente Susini—whose reclining "anatomical Venus" models were adorned with jewelry, their hair carefully arranged on plush pillows—have, Stephens argues, eclipsed the more functional models used in anatomical teaching, such as the eighteenth-century birthing machine of Angélique de Coudray.

Carolyn Lau's chapter is worthy of specific mention. Lau focuses on nineteenth-century Chinese trade paintings, produced by Chinese artists using Western techniques and intended for the souvenir market. Although the trade painting was largely eclipsed by photography in the second half of the nineteenth century, one suspects that many would have considered black-and-white photography a poor substitute for the vivid medical portraits painted by Lam Qua between 1836 and 1852. Lam Qua's medical portraits depicted tumors and other physical ailments, supplementing the writings of Western medical missionaries. Lau's chapter is a standout contribution to the volume in its discussion of intersecting and international [End Page 516] networks of knowledge as well as the complex racial and colonial politics that surrounded Lam Qua's work.

What is frustrating, however, in a volume dedicated to the medical image and knowledge production and dissemination is the lack of attention to questions of ethics and the reproduction of images. There is a growing interest in this area, as evidenced by the work of Jane Nicholas and Suzannah Biernoff (to name just two) and in projects such as the University of York's AboutFace.¹ The first image included in the book is a photograph of a corpse mid-postmortem. The corpse's face—arguably still recognizable—is visible, yet the face of the dissector has been cropped "for legal reasons" (p. 2). Chapter 11, by Birgit Lang, on artistic representations of sexually motivated murder in Weimar Germany, makes some pertinent points in regard to ethical questions surrounding the reproduction and recontextualization of graphic imagery (medical or otherwise). Lang's discussion of Erich Wulffen's 1910...