Medicine Through the Artist's Eyes

Catalog description

From Matthias Grünewald's Isenheim Altarpiece (c. 1512-1516) with its pox-ridden, emaciated Christ, displayed in a hospital for sick and dying peasants, to Frida Kahlo's The Broken Column (1944), a gut-wrenching self-portrait visualizing her chronic pain after spinal surgery, for hundreds of years, artists have used their work to document, explain, critique, challenge, and glorify medicine, its practitioners, and its institutions. This course will examine artworks from 1450 to today that depict illness and disease, doctors and patients, and medical treatments – or lack thereof. This class offers students an art historical approach to the history of medicine and its critical reception by artists working in different times and geographies. Through class discussions and close readings of scholarly articles, we will consider how the ethics of medicine have or have not changed over the centuries, and how the categories of gender, race, class, sexuality, religion, and physical and mental ability influence medical care. In addition to situating their own approaches to patient care in a vivid, art historical context, students will gain skills in visual analysis and written and oral communication.