Visualizing Medieval Medicine and Natural History, 1200-1550

Abstract

Historians of modern medicine have been aware for some time of the value of images and artefacts as sources in their own right: wax models, clinical photographs, portraits and advertising all require careful interpretation and can be just as informative as written texts. Indeed, they can be viewed as texts to be analysed using post-modern critical methods. This kind of visual analysis has only slowly spread to study of the centuries preceding 1800 where traditional iconographical methods dominate and where images often play little more than an illustrative role in the construction of narratives. This is the kind of attitude that Peter Murray Jones critiques in the opening chapter to this ambitious collection of essays. By broadening understanding of what counts as medical illustration, it is possible to gain new insight from images that hitherto have been taken for granted. Also, by considering ‘the relationship of image, word and medicine afresh’ (p. 1), it is possible to show how the ‘logocentric’ world of the middle ages used images in powerful ways that could owe as much to display and ritual as they could to medical and philosophical learning.

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