What can art history offer medical humanities?

This article charts the emergence of visual medical humanities as a space of academic research, creative practice and lively critical debate, with a focus on how art historical scholarship has influenced the field's formation. Concentrating on developments over the past decade, it offers an overview of current scholarship while highlighting opportunities and challenges for the future. We begin with a survey of medical and health humanities handbooks and readers, noting that their engagement with art and visual culture is predominately limited to the contexts of therapy, clinical pedagogy and medical history. The main part of the article explores art historical scholarship in relation to three areas of significance for the medical humanities. First, we address art historical research that engages with medical history, identifying major topoi including the anatomical body, the doctor-patient encounter and the close relationship between clinical and artistic vision; we argue that this work has tended to presume, rather than explicitly articulate, its relationship to medical humanities and recommend that art historians wishing to engage more deeply with the medical humanities need to clearly communicate what their work brings to wider debates in the field. Second, we explore contemporary arts practices that mobilise health-related experiences, forms of care and practical activism: medical humanities, we argue, has much to gain from a critical engagement with contemporary (as well as historical) art. Third, we review three art history-led projects that are redefining the field and promoting new models for collaborative 'entanglement' across disciplines: Art HX: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism; Visualizing the Virus; and Confabulations: Art Practice, Art History, Critical Medical Humanities By arguing for the vital importance of attending to the critical complexities of art and visual culture, this article aims to enrich existing debates and provoke a new wave of visually engaged medical humanities scholarship.

Face transplantation and the anatomy of facelessness

Heather Laine Talley locates the still-experimental technique of face transplantation within a contemporary 'disfigurement imaginary' that equates facial difference with social death. This paper extends Talley's account by considering the ideological and affective components of 'facelessness' as a shared cultural idea. The first part of the paper argues that 'facelessness' has a history that links the stigma of facial war injuries in early twentieth century Europe to current assumptions about the horror of disfigurement. The second part of the paper uses Georges Franju's Les Yeux sans Visage (Eyes Without a Face, 1959) to examine the aesthetics of horror and the uses of cinematic disgust. The paper concludes with a discussion of the 'framing' or management of disgust in the contexts of transplant medicine and anatomical illustration. Face transplantation, it is argued, presents a particular challenge to the 'spare parts' model that has dominated the biomedical approach to organ transfer

No disponible

Theatres of surgery: The cultural pre-history of the face transplant.

The first facial transplant, using a donor's nose, chin and mouth, was performed on Isabelle Dinoire in France in 2005, but the idea of removing or replacing the face - either with a mask, or with a living face - has been around for much longer. This article explores the cultural pre-history of face transplantation: its speculative existence in legend, literature and film before it became a medical possibility at the beginning of the twenty-first century. One of the questions posed here is: how (and for what purpose) do medical 'firsts' like Dinoire's surgery acquire a history? The article begins by considering the uses of the past by transplant surgeons themselves, and by those who are concerned about the ethical or psychological implications of organ and face transplantation. Having considered these different investments in the past - one emphasising medical progress, the other highlighting enduring anxieties about medical experimentation - we turn to the first cinematic portrayal of face transplantation, in Georges Franju's horror classic Les Yeux sans Visage ( Eyes Without a Face, 1959). An exploration of Franju's sources suggests a more complicated relationship between medical innovations and their cultural contexts and highlights the changing significance of the face as a site of medical and aesthetic intervention.

Medical Archives and Digital Culture.

When BioShock was released in 2007, reviewers praised the moral complexities of the narrative and the game's dystopian vision of what Ayn Rand dubbed the "virtue of selfishness". What critics overlooked was the extent to which the disturbingly realistic artwork and musical score relied on found images and sound, including a recording of distressed breathing from a physician's website, and digitised First World War medical photographs of soldiers with facial injuries. This article examines the implications of these acts of appropriation from a range of critical perspectives including Susan Sontag's commentary on the representation of suffering; recent literature on the ethics of computer games; and an online discussion forum in which players of BioShock discuss the moral "grey areas" of the game.