In recent years, increasing attention has being paid to medical imagery. While the medical humanities have proved to be a very productive field for interdisciplinary and visual analysis, most of the works on the topic come from historians of art. In this context, The Face of Medicine is an excellent book that sets a very good example for historians of both art and medicine. Hunter starts from three paintings exhibited at the Parisian Salons of 1886 and 1887 (Lucien Laurent-Gsell’s La vaccine contre la rage au laboratoire de M. Pasteur; Henri Gervex’s Avant l’opération: le Docteur Péan enseignant à l’hôpital Saont-Louis sa découverte du pincement des vaisseaux, and André Brouillet’s Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière) to explore how images contributed to the construction of the scientific personae of Louis Pasteur, Jules-Émile Péan and Jean-Martin Charcot in fin-de-siècle France. Going well beyond the iconographic analysis, Hunter explores the politics of representation of medicine and medical men, focusing on the formation of new types of masculinities. At the crossroads of art history, visual culture and the cultural history of medicine, The Face of Medicine convincingly demonstrates that engaging with images is key to understanding the social and political implications of medicine.
Each of the three chapters is devoted to the exhaustive analysis of a case study, which turns out to be a very intelligent strategy. Hunter describes a renowned scientist (Pasteur, Péan and Charcot) with a particular medical development (the rabies vaccine, surgery and hypnosis) and a singular problem. Pasteur’s portraits show him as a humanitarian scientist and demonstrate the intimate connections between medicine and colonial power in France. For its part, Gervex’s painting of Péan ready to perform surgery on a naked woman serves Hunter to explore the male desires that underpinned and complicated both scientific objectivity and artistic realism. Finally, the depiction of Charcot’s clinical lesson points to a variety of modes of representing hysteria.
This is one of the best features of The Face of Medicine. The examination of each of the paintings leads Hunter to study lesser-known images and visual objects commissioned or collected by Pasteur, Péan and Charcot. This is important for two reasons. First, as Hunter recognises, aligning these paintings with non-artistic images demonstrates the necessity of going beyond the history of art to rethink medical images. Second, the complex visual economy that Hunter identifies in each chapter shows that paintings, photographs, wax models and other visual objects always work in relation to each other. This point is further demonstrated by the rich variety of material that Hunter examines, some of which is barely known. The quality of the reproduction of the images is very good. However, all the reproductions are black and white, even when colour is an important element in the analysis. Hunter’s descriptions in this regard are very helpful and detailed, but they cannot substitute for seeing the colours.
Each chapter is self-contained and can be read separately, but there are enough points in common to build a solid argument throughout the book. I see two main lines which are discussed in the three case studies. First, the problem of the representation of bodies acts as a common thread. Hunter not only examines the representation of the medical men, so relevant for the construction of their scientific persona, but each chapter also includes extensive analysis of the representation of the bodies of other scientists and patients, such as children with bare stomachs, foreign men dressed in tunics and female patients naked or with their breasts visible through their clothes. These were not secondary figures. In Hunter’s book, the meaning of these bodies was crucial to building masculinity and, thereby, the power of medicine. In this sense, Hunter convincingly demonstrates that all the figures represented in the paintings and related images acquired meaning through the juxtaposition of each other. Secondly, and intimately related to the previous point, each chapter discusses the problem of the gaze and who has the right to see. This is fundamental not only in relation to masculinity, as many authors have pointed out before, but also in the private and public sphere.
The Face of Medicine provides to medical historians very helpful strategies for using visual material. Focused on the politics of representation, Hunter not only examines images at a visual level, but also investigates other elements: who commissioned the paintings, how images were created, their artistic traditions, etc. These analyses prove very productive for the examination of the cultural and social impact of scientific advances and medical figures. Hunter pays less attention, however, to the role of images and practices of image-making in the construction of medical knowledge. While this topic is discussed in the chapter on the Salpêtrière, it is not the main focus of the argument.
For their part, art historians will find particularly useful the discussion on realism. Hunter demonstrates throughout the chapters the theoretical and practical links between artistic conceptions of realism and the values and concepts that guided medical practice. The joint analysis of artistic realism and scientific objectivity helps in understanding the complexity of both notions, as well as their social and political implications. In my opinion, this is one of the most interesting contributions of the book. Instead of taking for granted what these concepts mean, Hunter elaborates a deep and detailed examination of how they were put into practice, thus finding connections between ideas developed in the arts and science. More importantly, this book acknowledges the contradictions inherent in realist and objective modes of representation.
In conclusion, I highly recommend this book. The very rich material examined and Hunter’s original analyses make The Face of Medicine a very informative and enjoyable read, especially for historians who are not familiar with working with images.
