Were They So Torturous? Reevaluating Modern Surgery’s Underdog Story

About

The Swann Fellow Lecture focuses on caricature and cartoon. Zoe Copeman, Ph.D. candidate in art history and archaeology at the University of Maryland, argues the history of surgery often discusses the field’s rise from barbaric vocation to distinguished discipline, playing up the “torturous tools” early modern surgeons used to illustrate how far modern surgery has come. Drawing from the Library of Congress’s 18th- and 19th-century caricatures, this research traces changes in the public perception of surgery and how visual media across disciplines would transform the surgeon (and his tools) into a powerful metaphor of European and American modernity.

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Archive

Library of Congress, in Library of Congress: talks and concerts

Licence or status

Rights statement at the Library of Congress, as the Library of Congress states it.

Credit

Library of Congress

Language

English

Country

United States

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