Medicine and Art

Session Chairs (Art History and Medicine scholars): Dr. Christine Bentley, PhD

(Missouri Southern State University), Dr. Elizabeth Morton, PhD (Wabash College),

Dr. Bernard de Bono, MD/ PhD (University of Auckland)

*If time permits chairs will briefly discuss their current project: “Medicine in Art: Digital Database of Global & Historic Perspectives on the Human Body Through Case Studies of Visual Artifacts”. This will also serve as an alternate presentation in the event of cancellation by panelists.

Titles and Abstracts of invited panelists:

1. Dr. Lan Li, PhD

Assistant Professor

Department of History

School of Humanities

Rice University

Title: "Illustration and Improvisation: Meridians, Nerves, and Other Anatomical Frustrations (1899-1957)"

This paper explores the limits of articulating anatomy through technologies of representation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It closely analyzes two cases, the first being attempts to map nervous sensations onto anatomy, and second being attempts to transform meridians into anatomy through nerves. In both cases, the discursive and material technologies established a contradiction between what structures looked like and what they did. I focus on British physician Henry Head (1861-1940), who tried—and failed—to use photography to capture sensations before turning to the famous acu-moxa pedagogue and camera enthusiast Cheng Dan’an (1899-1957), who internalized ambivalent attitudes towards the power of neurophysiology as an explanatory mechanism for meridians. By juxtaposing Henry Head and Cheng Dan’an, this paper further engages with the limits of photography as an epistemic tool, the challenges of describing nerves as anatomical objects, and the hazards of using nerves as an ontological framework for anatomizing meridians. In both cases, photography could not fully capture the expression of meridians in the same way that it could not capture the expression nervous sensation.

2. Dr. Andrew Graciano, PhD

Professor of Art History

School of Visual Art and Design

University of South Carolina

Title: “Anatomical Correction and Artistic Perfection: Correcting the Model in Life-Drawing Classes in the late-18^th Century”

In this paper, I examine the visual tensions among anatomical exactitude, artistic ideals and human reality as they are seen in different artistic representations of life-drawing classes and discussed in contemporaneous artistic theories/practices. The scientific motives of anatomical correctness and empirical observation were driven by a desire to achieve an elusive objectivity. The artistic motives of classical ideals and perfection were driven by the need to create art that embodied the eternal cultural examples of the ancient past. The imperfect reality of the human body, in the living model, however, cannot be ignored. As we examine these competing goals and visual examples, we must inquire what lessons were taught in life-drawing classes as well as what were the students actually learning and how did they apply those lessons, and, finally, what does that tell us about the institution hosting the lessons?

3. Dr. Marcia Brennan, PhD
   Carolyn & Fred McManis Professor of Humanities Professor of Religion and Art History Department of Art History Rice University

Title: “Even More: The Rituals of Life and the Representation of Presence in Acute Intensive Palliative Medicine”

Drawing on her clinical experiences as a literary Artist In Residence in the Department of Palliative, Rehabilitation, and Integrative Medicine at the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, Marcia Brennan examines the ways in which aesthetics can serve as a form of care for people facing the end of life. The poetic artworks produced in Acute Palliative Medicine often appear as meditations on multiplicity, particularly as people reflect on key transitional moments of life such as birth, marriage, and death. This paper presents three striking case studies in which these rites of passage are examined from the conjoined perspectives of literary aesthetics and psychosocial oncology. Ultimately, the stories provide insight into people’s capacity for creation and for the representation of presence when confronting life at the end of life.

4. Dr. Carly B. Boxer, PhD
   Carney Postdoctoral Fellow in Medieval Art and Architecture

Department of Art History

Rice University

Title: “Narrative Treatments: Case Histories, Image Programs, and Learning by Looking in the Later Middle Ages”

While most medical illuminations that survive from before the thirteenth century take the form of schematic, sometimes abstract diagrams, a group of images produced in England and France in the later Middle Ages attest to an interest in narrative, figuration, and artistic flair in the production of anatomical and surgical manuscripts. This paper examines three programs of images in medical manuscripts made in England and France in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and asks: how do these images require their viewers’ visual discernment in order to communicate medical knowledge? What can they show us about the status of looking in medieval medical practice? These three sets of images include a so-called “case-history” showing a woman’s illness and death in an English astrological miscellany made c. 1292; a group of images of bodily systems in a copy of the French surgeon Henri de Mondeville’s Chirurgie made c.1325; and a lavish set of surgical scenes in a manuscript made for the Duke of Bedford c. 1430. All three programs consist of multiple discrete scenes, each separated from the others by a strong framing mechanism and each suggesting a distinct physical, temporal, and medical context. Unlike earlier diagrams, these images do not present anatomical structures for their viewers’ apprehension; instead, they suggest an interest in learning about the practice of medicine in addition to learning medicine itself. In all three sets of images – as in the didactic texts they accompany – looking at patients and anatomical structures is foregrounded as an essential component of gaining medical knowledge. This paper interrogates how narrative, figural images could demonstrate the power of looking in a medical context.