This edited collection brings together new research by world-leading historians and anthropologists to examine the interaction between images of plague in different temporal and spatial contexts, and the imagination of the disease from the Middle Ages to today. The chapters in this book illuminate to what extent the image of plague has not simply reflected, but also impacted the way in which the disease is experienced in different historical periods. The book asks what is the contribution of the entanglement between epidemic image and imagination to the persistence of plague as a category of human suffering across so many centuries, in spite of profound shifts in our medical understanding of the disease. What is it that makes plague such a visually charismatic subject? And why is the medical, religious and lay imagination of plague so consistently determined by the visual register? In answering these questions, this volume takes the study of plague images beyond its usual, art-historical framework, so as to examine them and their relation to the imagination of plague from medical, historical, visual anthropological, and postcolonial perspectives.
Author(s): Christos Lynteris
Series: Medicine And Biomedical Sciences In Modern History
Edition: 1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2021
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 309
Tags: History Of Science; History Of Medicine; Cultural History; Visual Culture; Art History
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
List of Figures
List of Tables
Chapter 1: Introduction: Imaging and Imagining Plague
Chapter 2: Why Is Black Death Black? European Gothic Imaginaries of ‘Oriental’ Plague
Introduction
Overview: ‘Black’ Plague Before the Modern Era
Making the Black Death Black
The Black Death and Gothic Epidemiology
The Black Death and Epidemiological Orientalism
The Antihistorical Legacy of Gothic Plague
Chapter 3: Painting the Plague, 1250–1630
Introduction
The Augsburg Pamplona Bible: Plague as an Unknowable Scourge
The Morgan Library’s Crusader Bible: A Divine Disease with Material Causes
A Public Image of Plague in the Wake of the Black Death
Pitying Plague Victims in the Age of Renaissance Humanism
Explicit Symptomology in Late Renaissance Images
Baroque Plague Art to Stay Healthy
Conclusion
Chapter 4: Pesthouse Imaginaries
Plague, Re-seen from Above
Verona’s Ill-fated Lazaretto
Lazaretto Landscapes, Plagued Terrains
Painting Pesthouses and Plaguescapes
Writing Contagion into Plague History
Conclusion
Chapter 5: Picturing Plague: Photography, Pestilence and Cremation in Late Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century India
Plague as Image
Burning the Dead
Indian Photography and the Hindu Dead
Conclusion
Chapter 6: Reflexive Gaze and Constructed Meanings: Photographs of Plague Hospitals in Colonial Bombay
Introduction: Towards ‘Visual Literacy’ in Plague
What Can Hospital Photographs Offer?
The Photographs and Their Questionable Authorship
Negotiating Gender and Age
From Ball Room to Slaughterhouse
Publicised Convalescence and the Photographable Other
Conclusion
Chapter 7: Plague in India: Contagion, Quarantine, and the Transmission of Scientific Knowledge
Chapter 8: Bamboo Dwellers: Plague, Photography, and the House in Colonial Java
Plague in Java
The Plague House
Colonising the Home
Conclusion
Chapter 9: Making a Model Plague: Paper Technologies and Epidemiological Casuistry in the Early Twentieth Century
Introduction
An Epidemiological Paper Technology—the Plague Report
The Report on Plague in Queensland, 1900–1907
The Casuistry of Plague
Individual Liability
Place Infections
Rats and Humans—Making a Model Plague
Conclusion
Chapter 10: Ethnographic Images of the Plague: Outbreak and the Landscape of Memory in Madagascar
Official and Unofficial Representations of the Plague
The Plague Pit as Key Image
The Plague Pit, 2016
The Plague Pit, 2017
Conclusion
Index
