Reproduction and Representation: Visualizing the Maternal Body, 1880–1900
By: Jessica M. Dandona
This paper comprises a close look at the visual culture of medicine in the late 19thcentury, investigating how physicians in three early centers of medical training—Paris, Edinburgh, and Philadelphia—conceptualized the female reproductive body in pictorial terms. Created during a time of growing interest in public health and widespread anxiety over rising infant mortality, these representations define the ideal female body as youthful, fertile, and above all productive: the female body is, without exception, a pregnant body. I will look at three examples of works produced in this period, each of which explores the materiality of paper--at once ubiquitous, fragile, malleable, and portable--as a vehicle for representing reproduction.
Jessica M. Dandona earned her B.A. from Brown University in French Studies and the History of Art and Architecture and her Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in Art History, with a specialization in 19th-century French art and visual culture. She is currently professor of art history at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she teaches courses on art and empire, the body in art and visual culture, and modern art. Dr. Dandona has been the recipient of research grants from the Fulbright Association, the Boston Medical Library, the American Philosophical Society, the Huntington Library, and other institutions. Her current book project, The Transparent Woman: Medical Visualities in Fin-de-Siècle Europe and the United States, 1880–1900, examines the pictorial and material dimensions of teaching anatomy and midwifery at the end of the 19th century.