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Not for the faint-hearted: Gruesome medical illustrations from the 19th-century (NSFW)

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Surgery to correct strabismus, a misalignment of the eyes.
 
The artist Francis Bacon spent many hours poring over illustrated medical books looking at surgical procedures on mouth and tongue cancer, hare-lip correction, and tracheotomies. He declared these image beautiful, in particular the way in which the artist had used color to represent a tongue or a mouth. It was something he tried to recreate in his own paintings. Bacon was a voracious reader. After his death, more than 1,000 of his books were donated to Dublin’s Trinity College History of Art Department and the City Gallery, the Hugh Lane. Among this collection are works by Beckett, Nietzsche, T. S. Eliot, De Beauvoir, Elizabeth David cookery books, and a well-used set of medical textbooks, some illustrated by Frank Netter, others containing work by Joseph Pancoast (1805-82).

Pancoast was an American surgeon who pioneered many techniques in surgery and in particular plastic surgery. He also wrote the highly influential book A Treatise on Operative Surgery, first published in 1844, which compiled various surgical procedures or “processes” that exhibited the “state of surgical science in is present advanced condition.” The book contained some 80 color-plates and 486 illustrations, and was further enlarged in 1846.

Illustrations from another medical book that caught Bacon’s interest was Précis iconographique de médecine opératoire et d’anatomie chirurgicale by Claude Bernard (1813-1878), a French physiologist, who has been described as “one of the greatest of all men of science.” Bernard was the first to use “blind experiments” by which information is kept from the participants to eliminate any possible bias. He also believed scientists must endeavor to disprove their own theories as scientists can “solidly settle” their ideas “only by trying to destroy [their] own conclusions by counter-experiments.”

Like Bacon, I’ve had a long fascination with old medical textbooks and their illustrations as I find the artists’ depictions of surgery and disease beautifully capture the essential frailty of the human condition. However, some readers may find a few of the following illustrations potentially disturbing. You have been warned.

 
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The removal of cataracts.
 
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Surgery for correcting a harelip.
 
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Ear surgery.
 
Far more disturbing surgical procedures, after the jump….
 

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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12.12.2018
09:22 am
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Cholera sucks: The beautiful, brutal honesty of vintage Chinese public health propaganda
10.03.2018
09:41 am
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Out of all the “things” that have developed over the last few centuries, public health and hygiene propaganda is probably one of the most fascinating. To me, at least. From Victorian advertisements that looked more like S&M show-and-tell than healing tools to the wild VD films shown in US sex ed classrooms throughout the late 20th century, America has certainly had a strong history with weird and wacky ways to promote well being. I’m sure as shit not going to knock our flavor of crazy “stay healthy” publicity works since I own a good amount of 16mm films on how to prevent STDs and what fruits and vegetables you need to eat to stay balanced and pooping good. Wall to wall actors in fruit and veg costumes prancing about on a screen are great Friday night fun! Who needs bars when you have talking tomatoes and dancing grapes??

On the international side, however, I’ve become quite interested in Chinese public health posters and their history. First of all, many of them are incredibly beautiful. Their design and composition is quite a thing to behold. Considering that they are discussing how not to die of fatal diseases or some such topic, many of these communally shared images are awfully detailed and aesthetically pleasing. Others…well, their honesty and bluntness is admirable! And if nothing else, this is something I probably respect THE MOST about public health propaganda materials: they are there to tell you that you should really not fuck with the bad shit. The problem is so bad that they had to commission a poster for it. You might die.  It’s all about extremes in public hygiene education. There really is no middle ground.

While these posters may make you laugh or giggle, there is a fairly serious element in much of the content—they meant what they said. It seems strange to us now in today’s technologically advanced world, but when these posters were the social media platform, this was how messages about health were communicated. So just as a warning to those with a weak stomach, there may be an image or two here that are not completely, uh, ready for prime time…

It didn’t surprise me to discover that the US had a hand in China’s medical structure, nor was I shocked to find out that it was the Rockefeller family that introduced Western medicine to China. Good ol’ John D. helped to establish the China Medical Board and the Peking Union Medical College (PUMC) in the early 1920s (a medical school that still exists and is still highly respected). THAT SAID, the PUMC was certainly not an accurate reflection of the Chinese people. Based on the US John Hopkins model, the medical facilities did not truly attempt to include traditional Chinese medicine and thus many saw the PUMC and its work as Western colonization and were not super stoked on Rockefeller’s “contributions.” The tech may have been more advanced but it managed to completely steamroll over Chinese health and medical culture in its attempts to “modernize” what they interpreted as an underdeveloped society.

But y’know that was Western colonial thought. Fun times.

Anyways, above and beyond the obvious issues that arose from Old White Dudes fucking up (as usual) and deciding to make medicine and life-saving procedures a political issue (sound familiar?), some really fascinating health propaganda material came out of it.  Let’s look at it, shall we? (I could have captioned these, but that would have distracted from the art of these things. Plus it’s more fun to just imagine what’s going on if you don’t read Chinese.)
 

 

 
Many more after the jump…

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Posted by Ariel Schudson
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10.03.2018
09:41 am
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The morbidly beautiful medical illustrations of Dr. Frank Netter
08.22.2018
08:50 am
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An illustration by Frank Netter done for the Ciba Company during the 1930s.
 
Dr. Frank Netter was a surgeon during the great depression, though as a child growing up in Manhattan, he aspired to be an artist. As it turns out, Netter became both a great artist as well as a doctor and selling his artwork to his professors helped pay for his college education at New York University and two different prestigious art schools. Netter would open a private practice in New York, but the devastating financial effects of the Great Depression didn’t bode well when it came to his patient’s ability to pay for his services. Netter continued to sell his illustrations and paintings until one of his customers paid him $7,500 for a series of five pictures to be used in an advertising campaign. Netter had originally priced the entire series at $1,500, but for whatever reason, his client didn’t blink at the high price tag which for the time, was considerable. Netter quit the medical game in 1934 and became a full-time artist specializing in medical illustrations at the age of 28.

Netter’s best clients were pharmaceutical companies which used his work prolifically during the 1930s. In 1937 the Ciba Company contracted Netter to illustrate a flier for one of their new drugs. Ciba (later known as Giba-Geigy) and Netter would work together for five decades during which Netter would produce approximately 4,000 illustrations for them. Many of Netter’s illustrations were used for the company’s ambitious group of books, the Collection of Medical Illustrations. His arresting color images were later used again for Ciba’s Clinical Symposia digests, which the company provided to doctors and were still in use during the early part of the 1990s. So yeah, you’ve probably seen some of Netter’s work yourself somewhere along the way waiting for your physician to arrive, late as always. I can tell you this, Netter’s work is hard to ignore. His use of color is in line with schemes used in classic pulp novel illustration, and he used real patients for his subjects when depicting various medical issues, such as a man suffering the after-effects of a brain injury (pictured at the top of this post), or what goes on inside the human body during a fit of unbridled rage.

Netter’s paintings and illustrations are as remarkable as they are often strange and off-putting at times. Nonetheless, if you are a fan of things remarkable, oddball, and off-putting, (like myself) then you will love the NSFW images by the dear Dr. Netter I’ve posted below.
 

Netter’s illustrations were used by medical professionals all over the world.
 

 

 
More after the jump…

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Posted by Cherrybomb
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08.22.2018
08:50 am
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Bloody Disgusting: A gruesome gallery of vintage medical illustrations from the 1800s

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My father once bought several volumes of medical textbooks as a job lot from a secondhand bookshop. Why he did this I’m not quite sure. Perhaps he liked their fine red leather covers, their marbled pages, the beautiful yet gruesome illustrations of diseases contained therein. Perhaps he thought these fine volumes matched our home’s interior decor? Or maybe he hoped my brother or myself would one day study these antique books and become a medical practitioner? I certainly considered it. Indeed I nearly did apply for medicine at university but changed my mind at the last moment and chose a rather pointless arts course—my real intention had been to go to Art College and paint…but that’s another story.

However, I did spend many, many, probably far too many hours poring over these books and their fabulous colored plates of medical diseases, internal organs, autopsies, arterial systems, genitals, brains and what have you. I marveled as much at the complexity and wonder of the human body and its diseases as I did at the beauty of the illustrations. These were to me works of art that deserved to be hung in some gallery rather than just hidden away for the education of young minds.

Illustrations of different diseases and conditions provided an essential part in the development of medical treatment. All doctors need a good memory so they can recognize symptoms, ailments and you know body parts—and the work of illustrators in accurately depicting different forms of diseases—leprosy, syphilis or smallpox, etc—were central to a doctor making the right call in a patient’s’ diagnosis and treatment.

This is a tiny small collection of some of the vast number of disturbingly beautiful illustrations produced by artists for medical practitioners during the late 1700s to the early 1900s—and they are quite fantastic.

And the moral of my story? Well, if you ever get the choice between an arts course and studying medicine…do medicine because you can truly help people and maybe even make a shit load of money while you’re doing it.
 
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A thirteen-year-old Girl with leprosy.
 
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A thirteen-year-old Boy with severe untreated leprosy.
 
More beautifully rendered (and totally gross) diseases after the jump…

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Posted by Paul Gallagher
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06.21.2016
10:11 am
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