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Medical Archives and Digital Culture: From WWI to BioShock

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Suzannah Biernoff
Suzannah Biernoff
Affiliation:
Suzannah Biernoff, Department of History of Art and Screen Media, School of Arts, Birkbeck College, University of London, 43 Gordon Square, London WC1H 0PD, UK. Email: s.biernoff@bbk.ac.uk
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Over the last few years my research has focused on representations of the injured body and face in First World War Britain. Some of the most intriguing cases are those in which art and medicine seem to converge or redefine each other, as in Henry Tonks' delicate pastel portraits of British servicemen with severe facial injuries, and the equally exquisite – and unsettling – prosthetic masks made by the sculptor Francis Derwent Wood for some of these patients to conceal their disfigurement when surgical reconstruction was impossible. In both of these examples, art could be said to ameliorate – and in different ways to aestheticise – the horrors of war, and to humanise men who had suffered what were considered at the time to be the most dehumanising of injuries. In both cases, the sources that have survived contain assumptions – often unspoken – about how, where and by whom the injured body may be seen – assumptions that have changed over time. My current project considers the afterlives of some of these documents. When we encounter medical images in art galleries or on television – or in the pages of an academic journal – what kind of cultural and imaginative work do they perform? Are there ethical considerations raised by their re-deployment or appropriation within the contexts of art and entertainment, education and academic research?

Keywords

BioShockDisfigurementPlastic SurgeryProject FaçadeProstheticsHenry TonksVisual CultureFirst World War
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 325 - 330
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 Suzannah Biernoff, ‘Flesh Poems: Henry Tonks and the Art of Surgery’, Visual Culture in Britain, 11, 1 (2010), 25–47; Suzannah Biernoff, ‘The Rhetoric of Disfigurement in First World War Britain’, Social History of Medicine, advance access online, 27 February 2011, doi: 10.1093/shm/hkq095.

2 http://www.2kgames.com/#/news/2k-games-announces-first-installment-of-bioshock-reg-2-downloadable-content-now-available, accessed 8 February 2011. When Gore Verbinski – best known for directing Pirates of the Caribbean and The Ring – pulled out of the project, Universal Studios signed Spanish director Juan Carlos Fresnadillo, maker of the breathtakingly gory 28 Weeks Later.

3 Henry Tonks, Imperial War Museum file, item 18, 18 August 1917.

4 Tonks, quoted in Joseph Hone, The Life of Henry Tonks (London: Heinemann, 1939), 128.

5 <http://www.gilliesarchives.org.uk/Tonks%20pastels/index.html>, accessed 8 February 2011.

6 <http://www.readinggroupguides.com/guides_L/life_class2.asp>, accessed 8 February 2011.

7 Project Façade, <www.projectfacade.com>, accessed 26 January 2011; Faces of Battle, exhibition, National Army Museum, London (November 2007–August 2008); War and Medicine, exhibition, Wellcome Collection, London (November 2009–February 2010).

8 <http://www.projectfacade.com/index.php?/case/C81/>, accessed 26 January 2011; <http://www.projectfacade.com/index.php?/galleries/comments/lumley> accessed 26 January 2011; <http://www.gilliesarchives.org.uk/Tonks%20pastels/content/tonks67_lumley_large.html>, accessed 26 January 2011.

9 The relevant records are: WO 372: Medal Index Card entry; WO 339/57830: Officers’ service records; and MH 106/2204: Medical Sheets: Royal Flying Corps, I – O. I am grateful to Paddy Hartley of Project Façade for this information.

10 Canadian Libraries’ Internet Archive, <http://www.archive.org/details/plasticsurgeryof00gilluoft>, accessed 8 February 2011.

11 Game Rankings, <http://www.gamerankings.com/>, accessed 8 February 2011. The BioShock II website claims more than 50 Game of the Year awards for the franchise. http://www.2kgames.com/#/games/bioshock-2, accessed 2 March 2011.

12 <http://www.2kgames.com/#/games/bioshock>, accessed 26 January 2011.

13 ‘Project Façade vs BioShock?’, <http://forums.2kgames.com/forums/archive/index.php/ t-1836.html>, accessed 26 January 2011.

14 The link to the concept art is now inactive, but the artwork is reproduced in the BioShock players’ manual: Doug Walsh, BioShock, Bradygames Signature Series Guide (Indianapolis: DK Publishing, 2007), 51. Examples can also be seen on the BioShock Wiki: <http://bioshock.wikia.com/wiki/Toasty>, accessed 8 February 2011.

15 In Lumley’s case there are no known relatives. In order to protect the privacy of the other families, no identifying details have been included here.

16 Bioshock Making Of – Characters: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQ7YT8Ajr0c>, accessed 26 January 2011, comments at 5:50. Wells credits Ken Levine with the discovery of Project Façade. The Concept Artist Robb Waters also mentions using ‘old mug shots from the 1940s’.

17 On Leonardo da Vinci’s Grotesque Heads, see: Kenneth Clark, Leonardo da Vinci [1939], (repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1989), 120–4; E.H. Gombrich, ‘The Grotesque Heads’ [1954] in The Heritage of Apelles, Studies in the Art of the Renaissance, 3 (Oxford: Phaidon, 1976); and Martin Clayton, Leonardo da Vinci: The Divine and the Grotesque, exhibition catalogue (London: Royal Collection Enterprises, 2002).

18 David Sylvester, The Brutality of Fact: Interviews with Francis Bacon (London: Thames and Hudson, 1987).

19 ‘Project Façade vs BioShock?’, op. cit. (note 13), post by Nias Wolf, 18 July 2007, 10:03 am.

20 Interestingly, the Science Museum in London does take account of ‘cultural objections or taboos surrounding the representation of remains, as well as the display of remains themselves.’ However, this sensitivity extends only to images of non-European remains: <http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/about_us/about_the_museum/collections/human_remains/human_remains_policy.aspx>, accessed 8 February 2011.