Representing health and illness: thoughts for the twenty-first century.

摘要

In their critical paper on images in the health sciences, Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein pointed out the limits of visualisation and representation in the existing literature in the public representation of health and illness. They focus on the complex and multilayered field of medical representations as the site where levels of epistemic, philosophical and politicalpresuppositions provide insight into the interpreter's historical position. From a close focus on medical (or even public health) representations as a reflection of a partial worldview, to the historical embeddedness that they suggest is the key to understanding the limitations of all visual hermeneutics in the sphere of health and illness: [H]storians seeking to use visual materials need to be aware that any instruction as to their use is a priori discourse laden. The coming into focus of health posters in the 1990s and visual culture in general as something of seemingly great importance, something for serious critical engagement, is but a perception of one particular sociocultural moment (precisely that which we have sought to outline in this paper). It is a discursive regime, not a universal truth. Historians of medicine should by all means be encouraged to pursue the abundant visual objects in their field, and treat such objects in terms appropriate to the context of their production. A multiplicity of approaches is also to be encouraged. But they should do so with awareness of, and open candour towards the historicity of the discourses around the visual from which their approaches derive; that is, they should be attentive to how their mindedness to the visual has been informed.