This year, our sessions will function as a space for members to give and receive feedback on works-in-progress (WIP). This week we will engage with two pieces:
- Agnes Arnold-Forster, "The National Childbirth Trust and the Margins of Medicine in Modern Britain"
Agnes is an interdisciplinary historian of science, medicine, healthcare, and the emotions and a co-convenor of this working group. She is a Chancellor’s Fellow in the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh and has researched the history of cancer, the women’s health movement, the emotional dynamics of healthcare labour, surgery and the surgical identity, vaccine hesitancy and public health, the NHS, and patient complaint. Her piece offers a roadmap of her new project on the history of the National Childbirth Trust. It presents some of her early thoughts and plans for progress.
- Jessica Dandona, "In Living Colour: Realism and Abstraction in Anatomical Models of the Female Reproductive Body, 1880–1900."
Jessica M. Dandona, Ph.D. is Professor of Art History in the Liberal Arts Department at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Her current book project, The Transparent Woman: Medical Visualities in Fin-de-Siècle Europe and the United States, 1880–1900, examines the visual culture of medicine at the end of the 19th century. Her piece is a draft book chapter for an edited volume that looks at the visual & material representation of the female reproductive body/organs (from an art historical/visual culture perspective). This work focuses on anatomical models employed in the teaching of midwifery and gynaecology, including works by French makers Tramond, Deyrolle, and Gustave-Joseph Witkowski. Created during a time of growing interest in public health, widespread anxiety over rising infant mortality, and emerging pro-natalist policies, these pedagogical objects provided a widely-reproduced simulacrum of the female reproductive body and pioneered an enduring "anatomical aesthetic".
Both pieces are both WIPs and should not be circulated outside of this network. As always, readings can be accessed via this session's downloadable ZIP file (below).