Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference

by Sander L. Gilman

A study of visual sources, from 19th-century textbook illustrations to recent government AIDS posters, which finds that the history of our perception of the "beautiful body" is charged with anxieties about contagion and ugliness. It's also entangled with political implications brought about by our interpretation of race as a medical category, says Gilman (liberal arts and human biology, U. of Chicago). A history both of medicine and of the aestheticization of the body. Many b&w illustrations. Originally published in Great Britain by Reaktion Books as >Health and Images of Difference. > Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.

Genres: Nonfiction

200 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1995

About the author

Sander L. Gilman is an American cultural and literary historian. He is known for his contributions to Jewish studies and the history of medicine. He is the author or editor of over ninety books. Gilman's focus is on medicine and the echoes of its rhetoric in social and political discourse.