Visualizing Disease

Visual anatomy books have been a staple of medical practice and study since the mid-sixteenth century. But the visual representation of diseased states followed a very different pattern from anatomy, one we are only now beginning to investigate and understand. With Visualizing Disease, Domenico Bertoloni Meli explores key questions in this domain, opening a new field of inquiry based on the analysis of a rich body of arresting and intellectually challenging images reproduced here both in black and white and in color. Starting in the Renaissance, Bertoloni Meli delves into the wide range of figures involved in the early study and representation of disease, including not just men of medicine, like anatomists, physicians, surgeons, and pathologists, but also draftsmen and engravers.Pathological preparations proved difficult to preserve and represent, and as Bertoloni Meli takes us through a number of different cases from the Renaissance to the mid-nineteenth century, we gain a new understanding of how knowledge of disease, interactions among medical men and artists, and changes in the technologies of preservation and representation of specimens interacted to slowly bring illustration into the medical world.

"There is a long and distinguished tradition of scholarship on the history of anatomical illustration, Domenico Bertoloni Meli rightly observes, but somehow scholars have scanted what is perhaps an even larger category of medical image production--pathological illustration. Visualizing Disease, erudite, profusely illustrated, richly documented, begins to rectify that omission."-- "Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences", "This is an excellent book, based on extraordinarily vast, solid, and innovative research. In his previous books, Bertoloni Meli has already made very important contributions to the history of early modern science and medicine. Visualizing Disease offers an even more significant and original contribution, the first detailed and richly documented history of morbid anatomy illustration from the sixteenthto the ninteenthcentury."--Gianna Pomata, Johns Hopkins University, "A knowledgeable and authoritative survey of many of the most historically significant early works of pathological illustration. . . . It is a wonderfully illustrated and much-needed study that will be an essential reference for many historians of medicine, and especially those working on pathology, medical illustrations, representations of disease and any of the several historical figures featured among its pages. Visualizing Disease will inspire pathologists interested in the history of their discipline and, hopefully, future scholars exploring the history of pathology."-- "Medical History"

Domenico Bertoloni Meli is professor of history and philosophy of science and medicine at Indiana University, Bloomington.