Adolescent with severe untreated leprosy.
Wellcome Library, London
Wellcome Library, London
Many thanks to Will Self for cleverly reviewing a book that I would not have otherwise looked at. The medical images in Dr Richard Barnett's The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration (2014) were astonishing. The book was sourced from the Wellcome Trust and the pictures ranged from the Early Modern woodcuts, to the colour litho-graphs of the late C19th-early C20th.
Richard Barnett, author of Medical London: City of Diseases, City of Cures (2008), introduced the history of western medical science. He quoted William Hazlitt's remarks on anatomical illustration: "The learned amateur is struck with the beauty of the coats of the stomach laid bare, or contemplates with eager curiosity the transverse sections of the brain … And overcomes the sense of pain and repugnance. It is the same in art as in science."
This tension, between the functionalism of medical illustration and the aesthetic properties of the images themselves, was as present for the modern viewer as it was for Hazlitt – with this added humanitarian twist: whereas from the 1700s well into the C19th, the bodies of those so dissected and displayed were accorded no particular respect. However our modern culture of sympathy surely imbues even the most chopped up and diseased of tissues with sensitivity.
The strange, symbiotic relationship between medicine and social oppression was given full-colour form: by anatomical illustrations of paupers' and criminals' corpses, AND by what would be regarded as straight forward portraits of the leprous, syphilitic, tubercular and cancerous. The juxtaposition of styles of portraiture with such extreme pathological symptoms created an unpleasant sensation.
Here were ladies' noses eaten away by chancres, or men's foreheads and cheeks covered with warty out-growths. The extent of some of these deformations helped the viewer imagine the horror show that Britain's cities must have provided. There was also a tension between the portrayals of the disease and of the diseased: some of the details of necrotic tissue were so magnified that it was barely human.
Beyond the graphic impact of so much disease and disfigurement, what distinguished them was an acute paradox: here the styles and modes of bygone eras were used not to make people attractive or create a picturesque landscape, but to render the pathological as clearly as possible with a view to instructing physicians.
Forehead Tumors
Wellcome Library, London
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The Sick Rose - cholera
book cover
Medical illustration developed with the methods of easel painting, so viewers saw the same stippling and chiaroscuro. But while it was generally known that the early art schools almost always had an anatomy lecturer on their staffs, it was surprising that anatomical and pathological depiction influenced fine art in general. The use of lurid colour seems to anticipate both the Fauvists and the Impressionists, while the identification of the body as a site of perversity led to the Surrealists. Looking upon hands and feet, think of Max Ernst creating strange and post-human landscapes.
These images dated from a time when all methodologies, artistic, medical and anatomical, were still a-changing, and as such they presented the viewer with the more unsettling truth about our bodies: that they were/are always a foreign and frightening hinterland.
Wellcome Library, London
book cover
Medical illustration developed with the methods of easel painting, so viewers saw the same stippling and chiaroscuro. But while it was generally known that the early art schools almost always had an anatomy lecturer on their staffs, it was surprising that anatomical and pathological depiction influenced fine art in general. The use of lurid colour seems to anticipate both the Fauvists and the Impressionists, while the identification of the body as a site of perversity led to the Surrealists. Looking upon hands and feet, think of Max Ernst creating strange and post-human landscapes.
These images dated from a time when all methodologies, artistic, medical and anatomical, were still a-changing, and as such they presented the viewer with the more unsettling truth about our bodies: that they were/are always a foreign and frightening hinterland.
Writers called this elegantly designed collection of early medical illustrations beautifully gruesome. Many of the images eg head of a 13-year-old boy disfigured by leprosy, made most readers close their eyes in horrified fascination.
Barnett began with a quote from William Hazlitt, written in 1817, at the time that Edward Jenner’s controversial method of vaccination against smallpox, discovered in the late 1790s, was catching on in Britain. The Compulsory Vaccination Act (1853) made vaccination obligatory for all children born in England and Wales. It aroused strong opposition, especially from those unable to afford private vaccination. Jenner was called a money-grabber and quack; in 1862 his statue was removed from Trafalgar Square in central London off to a site in Kensington Gardens.
Each book section was devoted to a group of related diseases. They began with skin diseases, followed by leprosy, smallpox, tuberculosis, cholera, cancer, heart disease, venereal diseases, parasites and finally the fashionable gout of the leisured classes.
Egon Schiele,
The Pathological Body, 1910
Crucifix, 1914
Examine the book’s cover image, depicting a young lovely Viennese woman with disturbingly bluish skin and lips in 1831, during the first European cholera epidemic. Compare this last image, beside her portrait when she healthy – a standard comparative device in medical illustration.
See epidemiologist John Snow’s 1854 map of cholera incidence in London’s Soho slums, which explained cholera transmission as waterborne. But Snow’s discovery had little influence on C19th medicine and public health, in which the miasma theory of airborne cholera transmission dominated. Even Florence Nightingale, whose 1858 Diagram of the Causes of Mortality of British troops in the Crimean War was included, strongly supported miasma theory.
The social history illustrations eg some morbidly erotic paintings warning against syphilis, were fascinating. But the many images of diseased internal organs were probably more interesting for those with specialised medical knowledge. But not interesting now to modern viewers, apart from cancer, heart disease and gout.