C1. The History of Art for the History of Medicine Chair: Lan A. Li, Johns Hopkins University - Mary J. Hunter, McGill University: The Dark Side of Motherhood: Artistic and Medical Entanglements in Impressionist Images of Pregnancy
- Christine Slobogin, University of Rochester Medical Center: "Noses Reshaped": Plastic Surgery, the Cosmetic Gaze, and Racialized Connoisseurship in Andy Warhol's Before and After (1961-1962)
- Fiona Johnstone, Durham University: Becoming an Image: Contemporary Art History, Artists’ Books, and the Clinical Gaze
As is the case with studying medicine and the body, studying art and visual culture is about close looking; the art historian’s way of seeing can be as “clinical” as the Foucauldian medical gaze. The research presented in this panel demonstrates that histories of art and visual culture offer unique inroads into understanding histories of medicine and the body. By analyzing works of art, these three historians make a case for using the history of art in writing histories of medicine, and vice versa.
The papers in this panel show that, like medicine, art history and its ways of looking are intertwined with social histories and constructions of gender, sex, race, and class. Mary Hunter reframes Impressionism, particularly the paintings of Edgar Degas, in the context of contemporaneous medical conceptions of pregnancy, birth, miscarriages, and infant mortality. Christine Slobogin speaks to the histories of plastic surgery that can be read into Andy Warhol’s paintings of rhinoplasties, arguing that the surgical gaze and the cosmetic gaze that these artworks encourage construct their racial meanings. And continuing this focus on close looking common to both art and medicine, Fiona Johnstone uses twenty-first-century collaborations between physicians and contemporary artists – particularly through the vehicle of the artist’s book – to rethink the construction and purposes of the clinical gaze. Johnstone examines how consent, coercion, and collaboration are implicated in both the clinical and the artistic gazes.
When looking at artworks about or related to the body or medicine, art historical concepts such as style and composition can reveal – as these panelists show – historical attitudes towards reproduction, plastic surgery, and clinical care. This panel places the histories of childbirth, the body, surgery, beauty, and medicine squarely within the history of art, utilizing the visual methodologies of art history to open up new ways of seeing within medical history.
