Mary Hunter. The Face Of Medicine: Visualizing Medical Masculinities In Late Nineteenth-Century Paris

Extract

Mary Hunter’s The Face of Medicine crosses the boundaries of medical humanities, art history, gender and museum studies, and French history. Demonstrating the symbiosis between medical and artistic practices, Hunter offers a fascinating insight into the visual culture of modern medicine by examining the portraits of well-known late-nineteenth century, French medical elites Louis Pasteur, Jean-Martin Charcot, and Jules-Emile Pean. Reinterpreting medical portraiture beyond its aesthetic value, Hunter argues that the production of scientific knowledge on a wide variety of visual materials—portraits, anatomical models, photographs, caricatures—was central to the conceptualization of a male-focused idea of scientific progress.

Hunter's framework correctly notes that the visual culture of nineteenth-century medicine was entangled and inscribed with ideologies of sex, health, gender, and class. She expands upon and discovers new insights from the now widely-explored idea that representations of the body are socially constructed. What is new here, or perhaps more clearly articulated, is the process by which in late nineteenth-century France, artists, physicians, scientists, and patients worked together to produce a new kind of visual culture of the male medical body. As such, Hunter argues that artworks and medical collections played a key role in forming and reifying the public face of scientific medicine. Hunter’s analysis thus moves beyond the myopic study of a single portrait, and situates medical portraits as moving objects in medical textbooks, newspapers, artistic manuals, and encyclopedias.