The afterlife of images : translating the pathological body between China and the West / Larissa N. Heinrich.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Heinrich, Larissa.

Series:

Body, commodity, text

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Medical illustration--History.

Medical illustration.

History.

Medicine in art--History.

Medicine in art.

Missions, Medical--China--History.

Missions, Medical.

Medicine--China--History.

Medicine.

China.

Medicine in the Arts.

Europe.

United States.

Attitude to Health.

Cross-Cultural Comparison.

History, 18th Century.

History, 19th Century.

History, 20th Century.

Medical Illustration--history.

Religious Missions--history.

Stereotyping.

Medical Subjects:

Medicine in the Arts.

China.

Europe.

United States.

Attitude to Health.

Cross-Cultural Comparison.

History, 18th Century.

History, 19th Century.

History, 20th Century.

Medical Illustration--history.

Religious Missions--history.

Stereotyping.

Physical Description:

xiv, 222 pages, 8 pages of plates : illustrations (some color) ; 24 cm.

Place of Publication:

Durham : Duke University Press, 2008.

Summary:

In 1739 China's emperor authorized the publication of a medical anthology that included images of children with smallpox to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Those images made their way to Europe, where they were interpreted as indicative of the ill health and medical backwardness of the Chinese. In the mid-nineteenth century, the celebrated Cantonese painter Lam Qua collaborated with the American medical missionary Peter Parker to create portraits of Chinese patients with disfiguring pathologies, rendered both before and after surgery. Europeans saw those portraits as evidence of Western medical prowess, while within China, the paintings established a visual idiom, which influenced the development of medical photography. In The Afterlife of Images, Larissa N. Heinrich investigates the creation and circulation of Western medical discourses that linked ideas about disease to Chinese identity, beginning in the eighteenth century.

Combining literary studies, the history of science, and visual culture studies, Heinrich analyzes the rhetoric and iconography employed by medical missionaries to transmit to the West an image of China as "sick" or "diseased." She also examines the absorption of that image back into China through missionary activity, the earliest translations of Western medical texts into Chinese, and even the literature of Chinese nationalism. Heinrich argues that over time "scientific" Western representations of the Chinese body and culture accumulated a host of secondary meanings, taking on an afterlife with lasting consequences for conceptions of Chinese identity, both in China and beyond its borders.

Contents:

How China became the "cradle of smallpox": transformations in discourse

The pathological body: Lam Qua's medical portraiture

The pathological empire: early medical photography in China

"What's hard for the eye to see": anatomical aesthetics from Benjamin Hobson to Lu Xun

Epilogue: Through the microscope.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages [197]-212) and index.

ISBN:

9780822340935

0822340933

9780822341130

0822341131

OCLC:

164802735