Western Medicine: An Illustrated History - Hardcover

The second purpose of the book is skillfully explored in the first essay, by Martin Kemp, a professor of art at Oxford University and a specialist in scientific visual representation. Kemp makes a compelling case for the deeper integration of visual images into the history of medicine, arguing that there is nothing obvious about the images we make and those we have inherited. This book is intended to be an illustrated history in the sense that the reader is expected to learn from the images as much as from the text. The 180 illustrations in the book make a strong case for the importance of visual images in understanding how medicine works; what it is; how it is viewed by patrons, patients, and practitioners; and what part it plays in culture at different times and in different places.

This emphasis gives the reader unexpected pleasures and often a sense of immediacy -- of making the past concrete -- that cannot be provided by text alone. For example, a charming map of the medical school at the University of Montpellier in the 16th century shows how easy it was for medical students to walk to the St. Denis cemetery to find bodies for dissection, making Lisa Rosner's points about instruction in anatomy real and vivid and provoking the reader to wonder which route the students took. Full-color, glossy reproductions of manuscript illustrations accompanying Michael McVaugh's essay on medicine in the Middle Ages give this period a similar immediacy: pictures of an operation for cataract, examination of a wounded patient, and (in a 15th-century manuscript of Avicenna's work) a physician at a walk-in clinic. Picasso's painting on the death of his sister puts the patient squarely between the representative of medicine and that of religion, underlining Anne Digby's study of the patient's view. Jane Lewis's essay on politics and the state includes an advertisement of the benefits of the British national health insurance scheme, introduced in 1911. Anne Summers's fresh look at the history of nursing before and after Florence Nightingale includes stunning photographs: two cheerful, liberated nurses in full uniform pose for the camera smoking cigarettes, presumably during World War I (the images are not always adequately labeled).

This is a book to dip into, savor, and contemplate. Were it not for its high price (presumably reflecting the cost of high-quality reproductions), the book would be a good source for teaching medical humanities or medicine in a cultural context. I came away from my reading thinking how mysterious medicine has always been, and how difficult; how medicine and religion have been woven together consistently, arguably to the present; and how humans behave consistently (dreadfully) in epidemics.

Reviewed by Rosemary A. Stevens, Ph.D.
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