Face of Medicine: Rethinking Art's Histories

Hunter argues that artworks and medical collections played a key role in forming the public face of scientific medicine. Through a focused examination of paintings from the 1886 and 1887 Paris Salons that portray famous men from the medical and scientific elite Louis Pasteur, Jules- mile P an and Jean-Martin Charcot along with the images and objects that these men made for personal and occupational purposes, she explores how the masculinities of eminent medical men were visualised. Anatomical wax models, painted portraits, medical photographs and popular caricatures, amongst other items, were central to the performance of individual and collective identities, social and professional exchanges, and to the production of knowledge.

The face of medicine investigates the medical community's use of art and aesthetics, and the art world's cultural appropriation of scientific principles. It explores how artists, physicians and scientists worked together to produce depictions of bodies, diseases and sexualities that were considered as real as possible. By examining the competing claims to truth made by different media, stylistic practices and professions, The face of medicine questions the varying rhetorical strategies of realism, nationalism and objectivity to explore realism's multiple roles and guises.