Exploring the Intersection of Visual Culture and Critical Medical Humanities
In recent years, the medical humanities have taken a pronounced “visual turn”, recognizing the invaluable insights that can be gleaned from engaging with art, visual culture, and the methodologies of art history. However, the full potential of this interdisciplinary exchange has yet to be realized. What can art history offer medical humanities? This article explores how scholars of art and visual culture are shaping the field of critical medical humanities, providing new frameworks for understanding health, illness, and the human experience.
Defining the Scope of Visual Medical Humanities
While medical and health humanities handbooks have increasingly incorporated sections on art and visual culture, these discussions have often been limited to the contexts of therapeutic application, clinical pedagogy, and medical history. Art historians, in turn, have long documented the cross-pollination between art and medicine, particularly in areas such as anatomical representation, the clinical encounter, and the spectacle of the anatomy theater.
However, these disciplinary approaches have frequently remained siloed, with medical humanities scholars assuming the value of visual materials without always articulating their specific contributions, and art historians failing to clearly communicate the relevance of their work to wider debates in the field. This article aims to bridge that gap, mapping the emergence of visual medical humanities as a distinct area of research and practice.
We approach art history in its broadest sense, encompassing not only traditional artworks but also a vast array of visual materials relevant to medical humanities, including medical illustration and imaging, public health communications, films and television, medical museum collections, and therapeutic uses of art. By tracing key developments over the past decade, we identify three primary areas where art historical scholarship has significantly shaped the medical humanities:
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Engaging with Medical History: Scholarship that explores the visual dimensions of medical history, from anatomical imagery to the doctor-patient relationship.
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Mobilizing Contemporary Arts Practices: Examination of how contemporary artists engage with health-related experiences, forms of care, and practical activism.
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Redefining Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Overview of art history-led projects that are redefining the field and promoting new models for collaborative “entanglement” across disciplines.
Engaging with Medical History
Art historians have long documented the interplay between art and medicine, often with a particular focus on the visual dynamics of the patient-doctor relationship and the spectacle of the anatomy theater. Scholars such as Keren Hammerschlag, Susan Sidlauskas, Douglas James, Natasha Ruiz-Gómez, and Tania Woloshyn have explored the affinities between the clinical and artistic gaze, examining how portraits, sculptures, and medical illustrations both reflect and shape the power dynamics inherent in these encounters.
Mary Hunter’s work on the iconography of medical masculinities in late 19th-century Paris, for example, charts the cross-currents between art and medicine, while Anthea Callen’s research on anatomical representation in the long 19th century illuminates the “reflexive relationship between art and medicine.” Mechthild Fend’s study of dermatological wax moulages and the invention of photography further demonstrates the complex materiality of medical/artistic artifacts, which she describes as “troubling objects” that elicit embodied responses from the viewer.
Importantly, this scholarship often adopts a self-reflexive stance, foregrounding the scholar’s own bodily and affective engagement with the historical materials. By situating their analysis within the lived experience of viewing, these art historians attend to the social, cultural, and political contexts that shape medical knowledge and visual representation.
Mobilizing Contemporary Arts Practices
Alongside this historical scholarship, a growing body of art history writing has explored the ways in which contemporary artists engage with health-related experiences, forms of care, and practical activism. Giulia Smith’s 2021 article “Chronic Illness as Critique” identifies a “turn to health” in recent art practice, with artists such as Carolyn Lazard and Jesse Darling using sickness and disability as a critical lens through which to examine broader socioeconomic issues of precarity and structural inequality.
These “crip aesthetics,” as Smith terms them, often deliberately refuse the individualizing narratives of illness that have dominated both medical humanities and mainstream representations of disability. Instead, they situate health and embodied experience within wider political, social, and environmental contexts. As Lazard observes, “in order to politicise sickness, one has to depersonalise it first.”
Such art practices resonate with calls within the medical humanities to move beyond the “favoured topoi” of the suffering patient and the exemplary clinic, and to consider how illness and care might be imagined in more expansive, collectivist terms. By centering the embodied, affective, and political dimensions of health, these artists offer valuable provocation and inspiration for medical humanities scholars.
Redefining Interdisciplinary Collaboration
The final section of this article examines three art history-led projects that are redefining the field of medical humanities and promoting new models for collaborative “entanglement” across disciplines:
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Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism: This digital art history project explores the intersections of art, medicine, and race in the context of the British Empire, drawing on the expertise of both art historians and medical humanities scholars.
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Visualizing the Virus: Founded and led by art historian Sria Chatterjee, this digital humanities project uses visual media to consider the politics of visibility raised by the COVID-19 pandemic, bringing together contributors from diverse disciplines.
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Confabulations: Art History, Art Practice, Critical Medical Humanities: This online seminar series and book project aimed to make explicit the contributions that artists and art historians can make to critical medical humanities, while also expanding the boundaries of medically-oriented art history.
These innovative projects demonstrate the vital importance of attending to the critical complexities of art and visual culture within medical humanities research, pedagogy, and practice. By “entangling” art history with other disciplines, they offer new pathways for understanding health, illness, and the human experience in all its richness and diversity.
Conclusion: Towards a Visually Engaged Medical Humanities
This article has argued that a more visually attuned medical humanities is not only necessary but also holds immense potential for enriching the field. By engaging with the methodologies and materials of art history, medical humanities scholars can expand their understanding of health, illness, and the body beyond the confines of individual patient narratives or clinical contexts.
Conversely, art historians wishing to contribute to the critical medical humanities must be more proactive in articulating the value of their discipline to a non-specialist audience. This may involve publishing in interdisciplinary forums, collaborating on innovative projects, and fostering greater dialogue between the two fields.
Ultimately, the integration of art history and visual culture within medical humanities represents an opportunity to “encourage the emergence of different topoi,” as Fitzgerald and Callard suggest – to imagine illness, care, and the human experience in new and generative ways. In an era of growing health inequalities, environmental crises, and collective vulnerability, such a visually engaged medical humanities has never been more vital.
