@article{TheVisualCultureofEnglishMedicine:3043,
      recid = {3043},
      author = {Boxer, Carly B.},
      title = {The Visual Culture of English Medicine, 1348 - 1500},
      publisher = {University of Chicago},
      school = {Ph.D.},
      address = {2021-06},
      pages = {314},
      abstract = {Medicine in England came into its own in the fourteenth  and fifteenth centuries, melding the rich tradition of  scholastic medical thought developed at continental  universities in the preceding 200 years with the realities  of decentralized medical practices and religious approaches  to healing. Images in manuscripts related to medicine and  healing made in England in the century-and-a-half between  the first outbreaks of plague (in 1348) and the end of the  fifteenth century bear witness to this changing medical  sphere. They also indicate their own centrality as tools  for picturing, understanding, and communicating about the  human body. In “The Visual Culture of English Medicine,  1348 – 1500,” I argue that these images could guide  reader-viewers in understanding the connection between the  image itself and the body it pictured. Medical images  conditioned reader-viewers in the way images, bodies, and  images of bodies ought to look and ought to be looked  at.

Visual skill could take many forms in late medieval  England: the negotiation of comparison and difference in  abstract diagnostic diagrams; taking up the position of the  surgeon by making or viewing carefully detailed depictions  of patients; repeatedly looking at Christ’s wounds, or  making oneself look like Christ by applying images to the  body. By considering the programs of illumination of  surgical texts, diagrams in diagnostic and prognostic  settings, efficacious and amuletic images, and images of  bodies after death, this dissertation asks how the visual  culture of medicine contributed to a broader medieval  discourse around vision and visuality. Looking with care  could yield health, protection, or knowledge; but looking,  like medical theory and practice, had to be learned.

This  dissertation examines the ways in which medicine and ideas  about the body depended on visuality in late medieval  England in order to argue that images in medical  manuscripts trained their reader-viewers in the skills  necessarily to look carefully. The repeated looking, visual  differentiation and comparison, and oscillation between  universal and particular at hand in late medieval medical  images confront epistemological problems central to late  medieval pictorial representation. By conditioning their  reader-viewers’ ability to observe and interpret the human  body and its pictorial representation, late medieval  English medical images served as hermeneutic tools for  understanding the visible world.},
      url = {http://knowledge.uchicago.edu/record/3043},
      doi = {https://doi.org/10.6082/uchicago.3043},
}