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The first full study of “birth figures” and their place in early modern knowledge-making. Birth figures are printed images of the pregnant womb, always shown in series, that depict the variety of ways in which a fetus can present for birth. Historian Rebecca Whiteley coined the term and here offers the first systematic analysis of the images'creation, use, and impact. Whiteley reveals their origins in ancient medicine and explores their inclusion in many medieval gynecological manuscripts, focusing on their explosion in printed midwifery and surgical books in Western Europe from the mid-sixteenth to the mid-eighteenth century. During this period, birth figures formed a key part of the visual culture of medicine and midwifery and were widely produced. They reflected and shaped how the pregnant body was known and treated. And by providing crucial bodily knowledge to midwives and surgeons, birth figures were also deeply entangled with wider cultural preoccupations with generation and creativity, female power and agency, knowledge and its dissemination, and even the condition of the human in the universe. Birth Figures studies how different kinds of people understood childbirth and engaged with midwifery manuals, from learned physicians to midwives to illiterate listeners. Rich and detailed, this vital history reveals the importance of birth figures in how midwifery was practiced and in how people, both medical professionals and lay readers, envisioned and understood the mysterious state of pregnancy.

Visual anatomy books have been a staple of medical practice and study since the mid-sixteenth century. But the visual representation of diseased states followed a very different pattern from anatomy, one we are only now beginning to investigate and understand. With Visualizing Disease, Domenico Bertoloni Meli explores key questions in this domain, opening a new field of inquiry based on the analysis of a rich body of arresting and intellectually challenging images reproduced here both in black and white and in color. Starting in the Renaissance, Bertoloni Meli delves into the wide range of figures involved in the early study and representation of disease, including not just men of medicine, like anatomists, physicians, surgeons, and pathologists, but also draftsmen and engravers. Pathological preparations proved difficult to preserve and represent, and as Bertoloni Meli takes us through a number of different cases from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, we gain a new understanding of how knowledge of disease, interactions among medical men and artists, and changes in the technologies of preservation and representation of specimens interacted to slowly bring illustration into the medical world.

At the crossroads of art and science, Beautiful Brain presents Nobel Laureate Santiago Ramón y Cajal's contributions to neuroscience through his groundbreaking artistic brain imagery. Santiago Ramón y Cajal (1852–1934) was the father of modern neuroscience and an exceptional artist. He devoted his life to the anatomy of the brain, the body's most complex and mysterious organ. His superhuman feats of visualization, based on fanatically precise techniques and countless hours at the microscope, resulted in some of the most remarkable illustrations in the history of science. Beautiful Brain presents a selection of his exquisite drawings of brain cells, brain regions, and neural circuits with accessible descriptive commentary. These drawings are explored from multiple perspectives: Larry W. Swanson describes Cajal's contributions to neuroscience; Lyndel King and Eric Himmel explore his artistic roots and achievement; Eric A. Newman provides commentary on the drawings; and Janet M. Dubinsky describes contemporary neuroscience imaging techniques. This book is the companion to a traveling exhibition opening at the Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis in February 2017, marking the first time that many of these works, which are housed at the Instituto Cajal in Madrid, have been seen outside of Spain. Beautiful Brain showcases Cajal's contributions to neuroscience, explores his artistic roots and achievement, and looks at his work in relation to contemporary neuroscience imaging, appealing to general readers and professionals alike.

The volume provides an archive of some of the most beautiful illustrations ever made of the gravid uterus with fetus and placenta, which will serve future generations of investigators, educators, and students of reproduction. The approximately two hundred figures from over one hundred volumes included are from the late fifteenth through the nineteenth century. For each author whose work is depicted in this volume, we have used the first edition or first illustrated edition. In the commentary, each volume and illustration is placed in its historical perspective, noting both the significance of that image, but also some background on the life and work of the author. For most of the works cited, there are additional references for the reader who may wish to explore these in greater depth. This volume is a unique collection not only of these historical images, but also their place in the development of scientific study.

Aus wissenschaftshistorischer Sicht lässt sich feststellen, dass eine Erforschung des menschlichen Gehirns und seiner Funktionen immer auch mit der Bestimmung des Ortes einer Seele im Gehirn einherging. Die Autorin vollzieht die bildliche Lokalisation der Seele in verschiedenen cerebralen Einheiten nach und zeigt, inwiefern sich geistes- und naturwissenschaftliche Theorien zu Hirnfunktion und Seele in die Bilder des menschlichen Gehirns eingeschrieben haben: von den Drucken der ersten anatomischen Atlanten um 1500 bis hin zu Bildern des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts. Im Übergang zwischen der mittelalterlichen Lehre von den Hirnventrikeln und einer neuzeitlichen Hirnforschung standen Anatomen wie Leonardo da Vinci, Berengario da Carpi oder Andreas Vesalius, die durch eigene Sektion neue Erkenntnisse sammelten. Diese konnten mit der Erfindung des Buchdrucks auch einer breiteren Öffentlichkeit zugänglich gemacht und um neue Theorien erweitert werden. Der 1664 posthum erschienene L'Homme de René Descartes hatte mit seinen bildlichen Funktionsmodellen einen entscheidenden Einschnitt in der Art der Abbildung des Gehirns zur Folge. Zeitgleich erreichten naturalistische Hirnbilder bei Thomas Willis in England sowie Frederik Ruysch und Godefridus Bidloo in den Niederlanden eine neue Qualität. Gegen Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts markieren die Forschungen Franz Joseph Galls, Vicqd'Azyrs oder Samuel Thomas Soemmerrings einen weiteren Wendepunkt in Richtung moderner Naturwissenschaft. Die Betrachtung von mehr als 70 historischen Autoren und ihrer Werke wird durch einen Blick auf neurowissenschaftliche Bildphänomene der Gegenwart abgerundet.

From seventeenth-century broadsides about the handling of dead bodies, printed during London's plague years, to YouTube videos about preventing the transmission of STDs, public health advocacy and education has always had a powerful visual component. Imagining Illness explores the diverse visual culture of public health, broadly defined, from the nineteenth century to the present.Contributors to this volume examine historical and contemporary visual practices-Chinese health fairs, documentary films produced by the World Health Organization, illness maps, fashions for nurses, and live surgery on the Internet-in order to delve into the political and epidemiological contexts underlying their creation and dissemination. Contributors: Liping Bu, Alma College; Lisa Cartwright, U of California, San Diego; Roger Cooter, U College London; William H. Helfand; Lenore Manderson, Monash U, Australia; Emily Martin, New York U; Gregg Mitman, U of Wisconsin, Madison; Mark Monmonier, Syracuse U; Kirsten Ostherr, Rice U; Katherine Ott, National Museum of American History, Smithsonian; Shawn Michelle Smith, Art Institute of Chicago; Claudia Stein, Warwick U.

Today, pharmaceutical companies, HMOs, insurance carriers, and the health care system in general may often puzzle and frustrate the general publicùand even physicians and researchers. By contrast, from the 1880s through the 1950s Americans enthusiastically embraced medicine and its practitioners. Picturing Medical Progress from Pasteur to Polio offers a refreshing portrait of an era when the public excitedly anticipated medical progress and research breakthroughs.This unique study with 130 archival illustrations drawn from newspaper sketches, caricatures, comic books, Hollywood films, and LIFE magazine photography analyzes the relationship between mass media images and popular attitudes. Bert Hansen considers the impact these representations had on public attitudes and shows how media portrayal and popular support for medical research grew together and reinforced each other.

An investigation of the creation and circulation of Western medical discourses linking ideas about disease to Chinese identity, beginning in the eighteenth century.