‘Body to Body: The Dermatological Wax Moulage as Indexical Image’
Speaker: Dr. Mechthild Fend
University College London
Thursday, March 27, 2014
5:30pm.
Department of Art History and Communication Studies
Arts Building, Room W-215
853 Sherbrooke W.
The lecture will focus on a very particular kind of medical imagery: dermatological wax moulages, casts taken from the body of people infected with diseases of the skin to document their condition. The talk will explore the ways in which these images – made by contagion in the most literal sense – engage with the body of the sick. It will query what kind of images these medical wax casts actually are and why they were so popular as a medium of dermatological visualisation from the middle of the nineteenth century until the 1960s. The talk will explore the nature of these impressions based on the contact between the somatic symptom and the plaster which was used to make the moulds from which the wax casts were then taken.
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March 26, 2014