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School of Art and Design · ANU College of Arts and Social Sciences
In this course we interrogate the many and varied intersections and frictions between the medical and the visual from the Renaissance until today, with a focus on the gendering of medical knowledge, its practitioners, and patients. Topics of inquiry include: anatomical illustration; obstetric imagery; war and disability; arts activism; medicine in contemporary art; and the medical 'gaze.' Different kinds of images and objects are dealt with in each class, from illustrations of dissections through to oil paintings of celebrity physicians, photographs of ‘hysterics’ to patient self-portraits. We take an object-based approach, with students being encouraged to find images and objects of interest to them for focused examination. Together we endeavour to develop new methodologies for thinking critically and writing sensitively about images and objects that sit at the intersection of the history of art and the history of medicine, disability studies and gender studies.
Take-Home Test, 1000 words
Learning outcomes 1, 3, 5
Oral Presentation, 10 minutes
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Extended Research Essay, 3500 words
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
Participation
Learning outcomes 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
130 hours of total student learning time made up from: a) 36 hours of contact over 12 weeks: lectures, seminars and tutorials; and b) 94 hours of independent student research, reading and writing. Contact hours may include visits to major art institutions in Canberra.
No textbook required. Preliminary Reading Blackshaw, Gemma and Topp, Leslie, eds. Madness and Modernity: Mental Illness and the Visual Arts in Vienna 1900. Lund Humphries, 2009. Callen, Anthea. Spectacular Bodies: Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1995. Cartwright, Lisa. Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine’s Visual Culture. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995. Crimp, Douglas. AIDS: Cultural Analysis, Cultural Activism. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. Day, Carolyn A and Amelia Rauser, ‘Thomas Lawrence’s Consumptive Chic: Reinterpreting Lady Manners’s Hectic Flush in 1794,’ Eighteenth-Century Studies 49 (2016): 455-474. Gilman, Sander. Difference and Pathology: Stereotypes of Sexuality, Race and Madness. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985. Hunter, Mary. ‘Effroyable réalisme’: Wax, Femininity, and Madness or Realist Fantasies,’ RACAR 33, no.1-2 (2008): 43–58. Johns, Elizabeth. ‘The Gross Clinic, or Portrait of Dr. Gross,’ 232-263. In M. Doezema and E. Milroy eds, Reading American Art. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1998. Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989. Kemp, Martin and Marina Wallace. Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 2000. Lomas, David. ‘Body languages: Kahlo and medical imagery,’ 5-19. In Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon eds, The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture Since the Renaissance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Sheehan, Tanya. Doctored: The Medicine of Photography in Nineteenth-Century America. University Park, Pa: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.