Title: In sickness and in health : disease as metaphor in art and popular wisdom /
Authors: Dixon, Laurinda S.; Weisberg, Gabriel P.
Publisher: University of Delaware Press,
Year: 2004
Subjects: Metaphor; Attitude to Health; Medicine in the Arts; Medicine and art.; Art and society.; Symbolism in art.
Abstract: "The nine essays and more than ninety illustrations that comprise this volume reveal how visual imagery has played a significant role throughout history in reinforcing and establishing definitions of sickness and standards for physical well-being. Each author demonstrates how works of art and the imagery of popular culture both reflect and reinforce the power of medical beliefs to define and to limit human behavior, and how art and medicine work together to communicate social directives in support of a perceived common good. The essays range in topic from the seventeenth century to the present day, utilizing an interdisciplinary, contextual methodology that reconstructs the issues of an era and examines works of art against historical events and ideas."--Jacket.
Contents: Visual prescriptions / Laurinda S. Dixon -- Plague and politics in early modern Naples / Charlotte Nichols -- Bodily infirmity as social disease / Mariet Westermann -- Of vapors and vanity / Laurinda S. Dixon -- Cholera as plague and pestlience in nineteenth-century art / Gabriel P. Weisberg -- Decadent addictions / Elizabeth K. Menon -- Neurasthenia and the new woman / Annette Stott -- Codes of consumption / Sharon Hirsh -- Curing degeneration / Barbara Larson -- Sporting modernity / Joann Skrypzak.