Abstract
In the history of medicine, relatively little attention has been paid to the way medical illustration circulated globally—or to the issues raised by the cultural “translation” of such images. My goal here is to flesh out some of the history of this circulation and translation by exploring the aesthetic and medical connections between two specific anatomical collections, both housed at the Gordon Pathology Museum at Guy’s Hospital, London. The Joseph Towne collection of anatomical waxes and the Lam Qua paintings of the patients of medical missionary Peter Parker were both produced in the nineteenth century. Significantly, the two collections were part of related but culturally specific shifts in the way bodies (and diseased bodies) were viewed, represented, understood and treated. I explore some of the convergences and divergences between Western and Chinese medical and artistic priorities and will address some of the issues raised by them. These two collections are important, I argue, because they demonstrate how aesthetic considerations shape medical knowledge and wider attitudes about the human body.
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Notes
Of these Lam Qua-Parker portraits, there are 80 oil paintings held at Yale University Medical Historical Library, 23 hang at the Gordon Museum, four at Cornell University and one at the Peabody Essex Museum in Salem, Mass. There are also 15 gouache images in the Welcome Collection, London.
Traditionally, it has been thought that Smugglerius was either one of the smugglers Benjamin Harley or Thomas Henman, hanged at Tyburn in May 1776 for murdering a customs-house officer who had intercepted them trafficking tea. However, this has been challenged by Artist Joan Smith and anthropologist Dr Jeanne Cannizzo, from the University of Edinburgh, who argue that the identity of Smugglerius was James Langar who was convicted at the Old Bailey as a “footpad”—a highwayman without a horse—and hanged in 1776. Yet, it was unlikely since Langar, as only a thief and not a murderer, would not have been sent for dissection after death, whereas Harley and Henman were subject to the Murder Act, and accordingly sentenced “to be afterwards dissected and anatomized; which sentence was executed upon them.”
As told to Renilde Hammacher in an interview published in the Rotterdam catalogue, 13–23.
At least in Britain, in the first decades of the nineteenth century, they seemed to disappear as public anatomical exhibitions took a hiatus.
Maerker translates and quotes from the 1775 La Specola museum guide.
This sketch comes from a file of Burke & Hare ephemera at Edinburgh Central Library. It bears the inscription “Jessie Patterson—model for the Life Academy—murdered by Burke and Hare—drawn by J Oliphant.”There is a second sketch in the National Library of Scotland, which is similar but looks as though the woman were face down, as if on a dissection table. It bears the inscription, “The unfortunate girl Paterson as she lay exposed on the table of Dr Knox for dissection the day after her murder”(Rosner 2010, 114–115).
CR = Christian Repository Magazine.
Years after Parker’s retirement, other medical missionaries were using very similar language in new medical projects. In an 1885 address on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Canton hospital, T. W. Pearce observed that “the Chinese write and speak pictures”; therefore, “the hospital is a picture” that “supplies ocular evidence” of foreign faith in both surgery and God (In Cadbury and Jones 1935, 132).
Also recorded in Gilman (1986, 62).
Lawrence Weschler suggests that the reviewer was Oliver Wendell Holmes (Mr Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder (1995, 140).
I have seen this reference in other sources in the mid-1800s, supposedly written by “Mr. Lewes,” who I presume is George Henry Lewes, critic, philosopher and writer.
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Acknowledgments
I am very grateful to Bill Edwards, curator of the Gordon Pathology Museum, and Eleanor Crook, artist in residence there, and creator of wax anatomical models. My conversations with both, and my lesson in wax modeling with Eleanor have been immeasurably helpful in thinking about Joseph Towne’s work. I presented a short version of this paper at the British Association of Victorian Studies, September 2014. I am indebted to my copanelists Regenia Gagnier and Paul Young, and the audience for their insightful comments.
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Wagner, C. Visual Translations: Medicine, Art, China and the West. Fudan J. Hum. Soc. Sci. 8, 193–234 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-015-0072-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s40647-015-0072-0