Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper - by Christine Slobogin

About the Book

"Taking an interdisciplinary approach to medical history, this book shows the key role that drawings and photographs had in shaping the material, professional, emotional, and aesthetic parameters of reconstructive plastic surgery in Britain during the 20th century. Plastic surgery in twentieth-century Britain was a medical discipline with deep ties to art, artists, and art history. It was also a field still in the process of creating its reputation and its archives. Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper examines these archives, focusing in particular on the works on paper held within these collections by two artists: Diana "Dickie" Orpen and Percy Hennell. The discipline of plastic surgery depended upon the drawings and photographs made by these and other medical illustrators to craft certain narratives about their field, their practitioners, and their surgical practice. In addition to telling an art history of plastic surgery during this period, Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper engages with the affective parameters of archival objects, and with what working as a historian involves when done within potentially traumatic spaces. Paying particular attention to the emotional dimensions and effects of this visual culture and the ways in which it is archived and framed by the discipline of plastic surgery--then and now---Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper explores not only what it meant to make art in a surgical space, but also what it means to study these affecting paper objects in the archive today. This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND"--

Book Synopsis

An interdisciplinary approach to medical history that shows the key role that drawings and photographs had in shaping the material, professional, emotional and aesthetic parameters of plastic surgery.

Plastic surgery in twentieth-century Britain was a medical discipline with deep ties to art, artists and art history. It was also a field still in the process of creating its reputation and its archives. Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper examines these archives, focusing in particular on the works on paper held within these collections by two artists: Diana "Dickie" Orpen and Percy Hennell. Plastic surgeons depended upon the drawings and photographs made by these and other medical illustrators to craft certain narratives about their field and their surgical practice.

In addition to telling an art history of plastic surgery during this period, Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper engages with the affective parameters of archival objects, and with what working as a historian involves when done within potentially traumatic spaces. Paying particular attention to the emotional dimensions and effects of this visual culture and the ways in which it is archived and framed by the discipline of plastic surgery - then and now - Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper explores not only what it meant to make art in a surgical space but also what it means to study these affecting paper objects in the archive today.
This book is available as Open Access under the Creative Commons license CC BY-NC-ND.

Review Quotes

Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper reminds us that the history of medicine needs art history. Beginning with the premise that visual culture lies at the center of plastic surgery and its archives, the book demonstrates how much we have to gain by looking closely at medical illustrations, analyzing them in relation to both clinical and non-clinical images, and reading through a critical lens the biography of the surgeon as artist. This remarkably interdisciplinary book also models deeply ethical research as historians struggle to retrieve, and safeguard, patient experiences.-- "Tanya Sheehan, Ellerton M. and Edith K. Jetté Professor of Art, Colby College"

In this sensitive and nuanced book, Dr. Christine Slobogin offers us a holistic history of the intersection between art and surgery, highlighting the importance of surgical art as medicine. She excavates the story of two key and often overlooked figures in surgical art as important practitioners of the humor and art of medical and surgical practice, making visible the multitude of ways that patients can see and be seen through the historical and medical record of visual culture.-- "Prof Sharrona Pearl, Andrews Chair of Interdisciplinary Studies in The John V. Roach Honors College, Texas Christian University"