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Representing Health and Illness: Thoughts for the Twenty-First Century

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  17 May 2012

Sander L. Gilman
Sander L. Gilman
Affiliation:
Sander L. Gilman, Distinguished Professor of the Liberal Arts and Science Emory University, 201 Dowman Drive, Atlanta, GA 30322, USA. Email: slgilma@emory.edu
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In their critical paper on images in the health sciences, Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein pointed out the limits of visualisation and representation in the existing literature in the public representation of health and illness. They focus on the complex and multilayered field of medical representations as the site where levels of epistemic, philosophical and political presuppositions provide insight into the interpreter's historical position. From a close focus on medical (or even public health) representations as a reflection of a partial worldview, to the historical embeddedness that they suggest is the key to understanding the limitations of all visual hermeneutics in the sphere of health and illness:

Keywords

Medical RepresentationsEmpiricismSocial Context
Type
Articles
Information
Medical History , Volume 55 , Issue 3 , July 2011 , pp. 295 - 300
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s) 2011. Published by Cambridge University Press

References

1 Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein, ‘Coming into Focus: Posters, Power, and Visual Culture in the History of Medicine,’ Medizinhistorisches Journal, 42 (2007), 180–209.

2 Ibid., 205.

3 W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), 188.

4 Melvin Konner, The Evolution of Childhood: Relationships, Emotion, Mind (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010).

5 Sander L. Gilman, Health and Illness: Images of Difference (London: Reaktion Books, 1995).

6 Lorraine Daston ‘Science Studies and the History of Science’, Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009), 798–813.

7 Ibid., 798.

8 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge: Zone Books, 2007), 363.

9 Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The Objectivity Question and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988).

10 Marjorie Garber, Academic Instincts (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001).

11 Daston, op. cit. (note 6), 813.

12 Ibid., 813.

13 Mario Biagioli, ‘Postdisciplinary Liaisons: Science Studies and the Humanities’, Critical Inquiry, 35 (2009), 816–32: 816.

14 Ibid., 832.

15 Sander L. Gilman, Obesity: The Biography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010).