The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration

The Sick Rose is a visual tour through the golden age of medical illustration. The nineteenth century experienced an explosion of epidemics such as cholera and diphtheria, driven by industrialization, urbanization and poor hygiene. In this pre-color-photography era, accurate images were relied upon to teach students and aid diagnosis. The best examples, featured here, are remarkable pieces of art that attempted to elucidate the mysteries of the body, and the successive onset of each affliction. Bizarre and captivating images, including close-up details and revealing cross-sections, make all too clear the fascinations of both doctors and artists of the time. Barnett illuminates the fears and obsessions of a society gripped by disease, yet slowly coming to understand and combat it. The age also saw the acceptance of vaccination and the germ theory, and notable diagrams that transformed public health, such as John Snow’s cholera map and Florence Nightingale’s pioneering histograms, are included and explained. Organized by disease, The Sick Rose ranges from little-known ailments now all but forgotten to the epidemics that shaped the modern age. It is a fascinating Wunderkammer of a book that will enthrall artists, students, designers, scientists and the incurably curious everywhere.

• Crucial Interventions: An Illustrated Treatise on the Principles & Practice of Nineteenth-Century Surgery
• Smile Stealers: The Fine and Foul Art of Dentistry
• Mütter Museum Historic Medical Photographs
• The Resurrectionist: The Lost Work of Dr. Spencer Black
• The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death & the Ecstatic
• Mutants: On Genetic Variety and the Human Body
• Morbid Curiosities: Collections of the Uncommon and the Bizarre
• Beyond the Dark Veil: Post Mortem & Mourning Photography from The Thanatos Archive
• The Victorian Book of the Dead
• Human Anatomy: A Visual History from the Renaissance to the Digital Age