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Visualizing Disease: The Art and History of Pathological Illustrations
Visual anatomy books have been a staple of medical practice and study since the mid-sixteenth century. But the visual representation of diseased states followed a very different pattern from anatomy, one we are only now beginning to investigate and understand. With Visualizing Disease , Domenico Bertoloni Meli explores key questions in this domain, opening a new field of inquiry based on the analysis of a rich body of arresting and intellectually challenging images reproduced here both in black and white and in color.
Starting in the Renaissance, Bertoloni Meli delves into the wide range of figures involved in the early study and representation of disease, including not just men of medicine, like anatomists, physicians, surgeons, and pathologists, but also draftsmen and engravers. Pathological preparations proved difficult to preserve and represent, and as Bertoloni Meli takes us through a number of different cases from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, we gain a new understanding of how knowledge of disease, interactions among medical men and artists, and changes in the technologies of preservation and representation of specimens interacted to slowly bring illustration into the medical world.
Starting in the Renaissance, Bertoloni Meli delves into the wide range of figures involved in the early study and representation of disease, including not just men of medicine, like anatomists, physicians, surgeons, and pathologists, but also draftsmen and engravers. Pathological preparations proved difficult to preserve and represent, and as Bertoloni Meli takes us through a number of different cases from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, we gain a new understanding of how knowledge of disease, interactions among medical men and artists, and changes in the technologies of preservation and representation of specimens interacted to slowly bring illustration into the medical world.
- GenresArtMedicineNonfiction
288 pages, Hardcover
Published January 19, 2018
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July 1, 2023
What happens when you combine a medical gaze with an artist’s hand?
See right here.
"This plate highlights some key features of the Museum Ruyschianum of 1714 (see here): the central image shows the arm of a fetus in a liquid-filled jar; the hand holds a section of a prodigiously large human testicle transformed into cartilage. The description of the specimen gives the case history: after a contusion the patient’s right testicle grew to the size of an infant’s head, hindering his walking because of pain. Thus surgeon van Bortel removed the testicle, which weighed three pounds; Ruysch happily recounts that the patient survived and “pancratice vivit,” or “lives like a fierce combatant.”
The arrangement in the jar serves several purposes: the tiny arm emphasizes the testicle’s huge size. Notice also the decorative lid, as well as the lace and ribbon adorning the arm: such specimens were not meant to be removed from the jar for closer visual inspection. In the same jar, on the side, Ruysch placed a portion of a diseased uterus whose surface was covered with several black tubercles the size of pepper grains."
See right here.
"This plate highlights some key features of the Museum Ruyschianum of 1714 (see here): the central image shows the arm of a fetus in a liquid-filled jar; the hand holds a section of a prodigiously large human testicle transformed into cartilage. The description of the specimen gives the case history: after a contusion the patient’s right testicle grew to the size of an infant’s head, hindering his walking because of pain. Thus surgeon van Bortel removed the testicle, which weighed three pounds; Ruysch happily recounts that the patient survived and “pancratice vivit,” or “lives like a fierce combatant.”
The arrangement in the jar serves several purposes: the tiny arm emphasizes the testicle’s huge size. Notice also the decorative lid, as well as the lace and ribbon adorning the arm: such specimens were not meant to be removed from the jar for closer visual inspection. In the same jar, on the side, Ruysch placed a portion of a diseased uterus whose surface was covered with several black tubercles the size of pepper grains."
Displaying 1 of 1 review