Summary
Visual and Material Lab Lead Fiona Johnstone was invited to contribute to a panel presentation on “The History of Art for the History of Medicine” at the American Association for the History of Medicine Annual Conference in Boston in May 2025.
Visual & Material Lab Lead Fiona Johnstone was invited to contribute to a panel presentation on “The History of Art for the History of Medicine” at the American Association for the History of Medicine Annual Conference in Boston in May 2025. The panel was organised by Christine Slobogin (University of Rochester) and chaired by Lan Li (Johns Hopkins), and included presentations from Mary Hunter (McGill), Christine Slobogin (Rochester), and Fiona Johnstone (Durham).
The panel showed how histories of art and visual culture offer unique inroads into understanding histories of medicine and the body. As is the case in studying medicine and the body, studying art and visual culture is about close looking; the art historian’s way of looking can be as “clinical” as the medical gaze defined by Foucault. By analyzing works of art, the panel sought to make a case for using the history of art in writing histories of medicine, and vice versa.
Mary Hunter’s paper “The Dark Side of Motherhood: Artistic and Medical Entanglements in Impressionist Images of Pregnancy” reframed Impressionism, particularly the paintings of Berthe Morisot and Edgar Degas, in the context of contemporaneous medical conceptions of pregnancy, birth, and infant mortality. Christine Slobogin’s paper “’Noses Reshaped’: Plastic Surgery, the Cosmetic Gaze, and Racialized Connoisseurship in Andy Warhol’s Before and After (1961-1962)” spoke to the histories of scientific racism and plastic surgery that can be read into Andy Warhol’s paintings of rhinoplasties, arguing that the surgical gaze and the cosmetic gaze that these paintings encourage construct the racial meanings of these artworks. Continuing this focus on close looking common to both art and medicine, Fiona Johnstone’s paper “Becoming an image: contemporary art history, artists’ books and the clinical gaze” used twenty-first-century collaborations between physicians and contemporary artists – focusing on the specific case study of Liz Orton’s artist’s book Every Body is An Archive(2019) – to rethink the construction and purposes of the clinical gaze.
The panel showed how art historical concepts such as style and composition can reveal historical attitudes towards reproduction, plastic surgery, and clinical care, and 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 methods for seeing within medical history.
