COLLECTION NAME:
Undergraduate Thesis Collection
Record
Title:
Case Studies in the Visual Cultures of Disease: Epidemiological Representation in the History of Art
Creator:
Hall, Halie Rae
Subject:
Thesis (B.F.A.) -- Art History
Subject:
Savannah College of Art and Design -- Department of Art History
Rights:
Copyright is retained by the authors or artists of items in this collection, or their descendants, as stipulated by United States copyright law.
Abstract:
"This paper examines four case studies to explore how epidemiology is represented visually in the depiction of the spread and containment of historical epidemics. It will examine disease imagery through time in a variety of mediums to uncover how it has been represented and what can be learned from the connections between historical representations and contemporary epidemics. Close visual analyses of imagery of the bubonic plague in between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries, cholera in the nineteenth century, yellow fever in the nineteenth century, tuberculosis in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, influenza in 1918, and AIDS at the end of the twentieth century, reveal how visual culture has shaped responses to how diseases have been perceived and contained. These case studies will look at the representation of each disease in relation to the epidemiology of the time and what was known scientifically about its spread and containment. The images discussed range from painting to print media and will move through different mediums due to the changing historical modes of information dissemination, such as the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, and the rise of public health advertisements in the twentieth century. This study is conducted by contextualizing the images, which allows for a focused study of the visual circulation of information that is used to depict and control infectious disease. The case studies will focus on how the spread and containment of disease is depicted visually and what we can learn about contemporary pandemics from historical representations of disease." --Abstract
Keywords: contagion, containment, epidemic, epidemiology, infectious disease, pandemic, print media, visual culture
Keywords: contagion, containment, epidemic, epidemiology, infectious disease, pandemic, print media, visual culture
Publisher:
Savannah, Georgia: Savannah College of Art and Design
Date:
2020-05
Format:
1 online resource: 1 PDF (Thesis, 76 pages, color illustrations)