In Sickness and in Health: Disease As Metaphor in Art and Popular Wisdom

by Laurinda S. Dixon (Editor)

Overview

The essays in this collection offer an expansive view of how medical concerns have shaped and continue to shape our lives and destinies through the subtle communicative power of the visual arts and their interpretation in historical context. Each author demonstrates how works of art and the imagery of popular culture both reflect and reinforce the power of medical beliefs to define and to limit human behavior, and how art and medicine work together to communicate social directives in support of a perceived common good. Beginning in the seventeenth century and continuing to the modern era, subjects include discussions of hysteria, addiction, neurasthenia, consumption, cholera, and the culture of physical fitness as socially constructed phenomena that communicate powerful political agendas. Illustrated.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781611492477
Publisher:	University Press Copublishing Division
Publication date:	09/01/2004
Pages:	224
Product dimensions:	8.70(w) x 11.00(h) x 0.90(d)

About the Author

Laurinda S. Dixon currently holds the William P. Tolley Distinguished Teaching Professorship in the Humanities at Syracuse University.

Table of Contents

	Foreword	7
	Introduction. Visual Prescriptions: in Sickness and in Health	9
	Plague And Politics in Early Modern Naples: The Relics of San Gennaro	21
	Bodily Infirmity as Social Disease: The Art of Adriaen van de Venne	45
	Of Vapors and Vanity: The Swinging Eighteenth Century	62
	Cholera as Plague and Pestilence in Nineteenth-Century Art	82
	Decadent Addictions: Tobacco, Alcohol, Popular Imagery, and Cafe Culture in France	101
	Neurasthenia and the New Woman: Thomas Eakins's Portrait of Amelia van Buren	125
	Codes of Consumption: Tuberculosis and Body Image at the Fin-de-siecle	144
	Curing Degeneration: Health and the Neoclassical Body in Early Twentieth-Century France	166
	Sporting Modernity: Artists and the Athletic Body in Germany, 1918-1934	187
	Selected Bibliography	213
	Notes on Contributors	217
	Index	219