Ludmilla Jordanova: Cultures of Surgery

All medical fields have their cultures, both among professionals and in the wider world. Such cultures tend to be metaphorically rich. By that token surgery has been associated with, variously, butchery, cutting open, delving inside, mutilation, penetration and so on. We can see these features in satires, which for several centuries have developed a critical language, visual as well as verbal, for speaking about the aspects of surgery that perhaps seem most frightening to outsiders, and that may sometimes be embraced by insiders in developing a collective identity. Feminist commentators and artists have been particularly alert to the gender issues embedded in medical cultures generally, and surgical cultures specifically. I was first working on these themes in the 1980s, but since then a good deal has changed. One of the most striking shifts is the rise of elective surgery, which covers a wide range of phenomena, but in all cases is capable of shedding light on the ways people think about, represent and spend money on their bodies. Another is the interest in disability. My current interest is primarily in visual representation. So I also can’t help but observe how persistent religious motifs are in the representation of pain, suffering and bodily mutilation. My talk will consider a range of artistic representations of bodies in the context of surgery, for example, by Barbara Hepworth in the 1940s and John Bellany in the 1980s, and explore how we might use them to think about broader historical and political issues. Surgeons’ relationships with human bodies have been contentious for a long time; visual culture offers rich opportunities for exploring the complexities involved.

Ludmilla Jordanova is Professor of History and Visual Culture at the University of Durham. She has held posts at the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Essex, York, East Anglia and at King’s College, London. Her training was in the natural sciences, history and philosophy of science and art history. She has long worked on aspects of medicine, and she seeks to blend history and art history while doing so. A Trustee of the National Portrait Gallery between 2001 and 2009, she is currently a Trustee of the Science Museum group. The Look of the Past: Visual and Material Evidence in Historical Practice came out in 2012; she is currently preparing the third edition of History in Practice and writing a book about ‘medical’ portraits to be called Traces of Life.