Image de la médecine moderne

Image of Modern Medicine

Augustus C. Long Health Sciences Library
Columbia University - New York

October 18th at 6pm with refreshments at 5:30
Russ Berrie Medical Pavilion, 1150 St. Nicholas Ave. at West 168th St., Room 2

John Harley Warner, Avalon Professor of the History of Medicine, Yale University School of Medicine

In his upcoming History of the Health Sciences Lecture, Image of Modern Medicine: Professional Identity, Aesthetic Belonging, and the American Physician, 1880-1950, Prof. Warner focuses on the visual choices that American physicians made in representing their profession, their work, and themselves during the decades when an historically "modern" medical culture was set in place, the 1880's through the 1940's.

Historians have recently emphasized the role that image played in the formation of modern medicine, but the visual images they have explored in connection with this process have tended to focus on images of experimental laboratory science as emblematic of medical modernity. Warner will explore several counterexamples - that is, genres of self-representation in which medical students and physicians did not seek to link their identity with the laboratory and in some ways distanced themselves from the image and ideals of experimental science. The cultivation of these images by doctors invites us to see the cultural grounding of "modern medicine" as vastly more complex story than generally realized.

For more information contact Stephen Novak at hslarchives@columbia.edu