Visual Culture and Pandemic Disease Since 1750 by Morton, Marsha; Akehurst, Ann-Marie;

Short description:

Through case studies, this book investigates the pictorial imaging of epidemics globally, especially from the late eighteenth century through the 1920s when, amidst expanding industrialism, colonialism, and scientific research, the world endured a succession of pandemics in tandem with the rise of popular visual culture and new media.

Long description:

Through case studies, this book investigates the pictorial imaging of epidemics globally, especially from the late eighteenth century through the 1920s when, amidst expanding Western industrialism, colonialism, and scientific research, the world endured a succession of pandemics in tandem with the rise of popular visual culture and new media.

Images discussed range from the depiction of people and places to the invisible realms of pathogens and emotions, while topics include the messaging of disease prevention and containment in public health initiatives, the motivations of governments to ensure control, the criticism of authority in graphic satire, and the private experience of illness in the domestic realm. Essays explore biomedical conditions as well as the recurrent constructed social narratives of bias, blame, and othering regarding race, gender, and class that are frequently highlighted in visual representations.

This volume offers a pictured genealogy of pandemic experience that has continuing resonance. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies, history of medicine, and medical humanities.

Table of Contents:

Introduction Picturing Pandemics  Part 1: Treating and Experiencing Disease: Medicine, Religion, and Myth  1. The Inception of ‘Science and Supplication’: Architectural Programs, Devotional Paintings, and Votive Processions in Early Modern Venice  2. Anatomy, Microscopy, and Satire: Looking at Cholera in Early Nineteenth-Century England  3. Combating Cholera: Tanuki Scrotum and The Visual Culture of Disease in Nineteenth Century Japan  4. Jean Geoffroy and the Conflicted Response to Childhood Epidemics in Fin-de-Siècle France  5. Spaces of Sickness: The Phenomenology of the Sickroom in Nordic Symbolist Art   Part 2: Reporting, Representing, and Interpreting Disease  6. Invisible Destroyers: Cholera and COVID in British Visual Culture  7. Contagion and the Camera: The Iconography of Disease in Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century India  8. Capturing the Invisible Enemy: Photographs of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic  9. Contaminating the "End of AIDS" in Contemporary British AIDS Media  Part 3: Public Health: The Politics of Body and State  10. Plague, Trade, and Governance in Eighteenth-Century Tunisia  11. Deconstructing the Story of a Contagion: Tuberculosis and Its Representations in Early Republican Turkey