Abstract
This chapter addresses the various ways surgeons have made use of images in their theory and practice from the sixteenth century to the present day. Over this period, surgeons have adopted numerous visualizing strategies to market their skills, define their professional identities, and guide and assess their interventions. Here we explore a variety of these images, from woodcut illustrations to X-ray scans, as well as the ways in which historians of medicine and science, art historians, and sociologists have conceptualized these visual representations in the wake of the ‘visual turn’ of late twentieth-century historical scholarship.
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Further Readings
Daston, Lorraine and Peter Galison. Objectivity. New York: Zone Books‚ 2007.
Gilman, Sander L. Disease and Representation: Images of Illness from Madness to AIDS. Ithica and London: Cornell University Press, 1988.
Hirschauer, Stefen. ‘The Manufacture of Bodies in Surgery.’ Social Studies of Science 21:2 (1991): 279–319.
Jordanova, Ludmilla. Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine Between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1989.
Ostherr, Kirsten. ‘Medical Education Through Film: Animating Anatomy at the American College of Surgeons and Eastman Kodak.’ In Learning with the Lights Off: Educational Film in the United States, edited by Devin Orgeron, Marsha Orgeron and Dan Streible, 168–192. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012.
Pasveer, Bernike. ‘Representing or Mediating: A History and Philosophy of X-ray Images in Medicine’. In Rethinking Representational Practices in Knowledge Building and Science Communication edited by Luc Pauwels, 41–62. Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2006.
Schlich, Thomas. Surgery, Science and Industry: A Revolution in Fracture Care, 1950s–1990s. Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002.
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Van Dijck, Jose. The Transparent Body: A Cultural Analysis of Medical Imaging. Seattle: University of Washington, 2015.
Zetka, James R. Surgeons and the Scope. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2013.
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Palfreyman, H., Rabier, C. (2018). Visualizing Surgery: Surgeons’ Use of Images, 1600–Present. In: Schlich, T. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Surgery. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95260-1_14
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-349-95260-1_14
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