The Fielding H. Garrison lecture: the aesthetic grounding of modern medicine.
This article focuses on visual choices that American physicians made in representing their profession, their work, and themselves during the decades when modern medical culture was set in place, the 1880s through the 1940s. Historians have emphasized the role that image played in the formation of modern medicine, but the visual images they have explored in connection to this process have tended to take a reductionist aesthetic identified with experimental laboratory science as emblematic of medical modernity. Explored here instead are several counterexamples-genres of self-representation in which medical students and physicians did not seek to link their identity with the laboratory and in some ways distanced themselves from the image and ideals of experimental science. The cultivation of these images invites us to see the cultural grounding of modern medicine as vastly more complex than a story scripted around the biomedical embrace of a stripped down, reductionist aesthetic.
John Harley
JH
Warner
D002170:Canada; D004954:Esthetics; D006666:History of Medicine; D049672:History, 19th Century; D049673:History, 20th Century; D010781:Photography; D010820:Physicians; D014481:United States