Imagining Illness: Public Health and Visual Culture

by David Serlin (Editor), Liping Bu (Contributor), Lisa Cartwright (Contributor)

From seventeenth-century broadsides about the handling of dead bodies, printed during London's plague years, to YouTube videos about preventing the transmission of STDs, public health advocacy and education has always had a powerful visual component. Imagining Illness explores the diverse visual culture of public health, broadly defined, from the nineteenth century to the present.


Contributors to this volume examine historical and contemporary visual practices-Chinese health fairs, documentary films produced by the World Health Organization, illness maps, fashions for nurses, and live surgery on the Internet-in order to delve into the political and epidemiological contexts underlying their creation and dissemination.
 

Liping Bu, Alma College; Lisa Cartwright, U of California, San Diego; Roger Cooter, U College London; William H. Helfand; Lenore Manderson, Monash U, Australia; Emily Martin, New York U; Gregg Mitman, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Mark Monmonier, Syracuse U; Kirsten Ostherr, Rice U; Katherine Ott, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian; Shawn Michelle Smith, Art Institute of Chicago; Claudia Stein, Warwick U.

Genres: Health

320 pages, Paperback

First published December 6, 2010

About the author

David Serlin is associate professor of communication at the University of California, San Diego. He is coeditor of Artificial Parts, Practical Lives: Modern Histories of Prosthetics and Policing Public Sex: Queer Politics and the Future of AIDS Activism.