Title The afterlife of images : translating the pathological body between China and the West / Larissa N. Heinrich

Published Durham : Duke University Press, 2008 ©2008

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Description 1 online resource (xiv, 222 pages, 8 pages of plates) : illustrations (some color) Series Body, commodity, text Body, commodity, text. Contents How China became the "cradle of smallpox": transformations in discourse -- The pathological body: Lam Qua's medical portraiture -- The pathological empire: early medical photography in China -- "What's hard for the eye to see": anatomical aesthetics from Benjamin Hobson to Lu Xun -- Epilogue: Through the microscope Summary "In 1739 China's emperor authorized the publication of a medical text that included images of children with smallpox to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Those images made their way to Europe, where they were interpreted as indicative of the ill health and medical backwardness of the Chinese. In the mid-nineteenth century, the celebrated Cantonese painter Lam Qua collaborated with the American medical missionary Peter Parker in the creation of portraits of Chinese patients with disfiguring pathologies, rendered both before and after surgery. Europeans saw those portraits as evidence of Western medical prowess. Within China, the visual idiom that the paintings established influenced the development of medical photography. In The Afterlife of Images, Larissa N. Heinrich investigates the creation and circulation of Western medical discourses that linked ideas about disease to Chinese identity beginning in the eighteenth century." "Combining literary studies, the history of science, and visual culture studies, Heinrich analyzes the rhetoric and iconography through which medical missionaries transmitted to the West an image of China as "sick" or "diseased" She also examines the absorption of that image back into China through missionary activity, through the earliest translations of Western medical texts into Chinese, and even through the literature of Chinese nationalism. Heinrich argues that over time "scientific" Western representations of the Chinese body and culture accumulated a host of secondary meanings, taking on an afterlife with lasting consequences for conceptions of Chinese identity in China and beyond its borders."-- Publisher Bibliography Includes bibliographical references (pages 197-212) and index Notes Master and use copy. Digital master created according to Benchmark for Faithful Digital Reproductions of Monographs and Serials, Version 1. Digital Library Federation, December 2002. http://purl.oclc.org/DLF/benchrepro0212 MiAaHDL English digitized 2010 HathiTrust Digital Library committed to preserve pda MiAaHDL Print version record Subject Medical illustration -- History Medicine in art -- History Missions, Medical -- China -- History Medicine -- China -- History Health attitudes. Cross-cultural studies. Medicine -- History -- 18th century. Medicine and art -- History Medicine in the Arts Attitude to Health Cross-Cultural Comparison History, 18th Century History, 19th Century History, 20th Century Medical Illustration -- history Missions and Missionaries -- history Stereotyping MEDICAL -- History. HISTORY -- Asia -- China. Medicine and art Health attitudes Cross-cultural studies Medicine in art Medical illustration Medicine Missions, Medical Chinabild Krankheit Bildliche Darstellung Kulturkontakt Europe. China Europe United States Europe China Westliche Welt China Genre/Form History Form Electronic book LC no. 2007032555 ISBN 9780822388821 0822388820 9786613022660 6613022667 1283022664 9781283022668

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