Putting Plastic Surgery on Paper: How Art and Archives Defined Second World War Reconstructive Surgery in Britain

Description of Talk: Plastic surgery in twentieth-century Britain was a medical discipline with deep ties to art, artists, and art history. It was also a field still in the process of creating its reputation and its archives. This talk, based on material from Slobogin's forthcoming book, examines these archives, focusing in particular on the works on paper held within these collections by two artists: Diana "Dickie" Orpen and Percy Hennell. Plastic surgeons depended upon the drawings and photographs made by these and other medical illustrators to craft certain narratives about their field and their surgical practice.

 

Bio: Christine Slobogin is an Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester, with a Joint Appointment in the Department of Art and Art History. Her research lies at the intersection of art history, the history of medicine, and the health humanities, with her first book focusing on twentieth-century British reconstructive plastic surgery and visual culture. She is now working on a project on the histories and ethics of anonymity in medical photography. She also has an edited volume forthcoming from Manchester University Press titled Sick Jokes: Visual Histories of Humour, Health, and the Body. She is the founder, producer, and co-host of several podcasts, including: “Drawing Blood,” a podcast about art and visual culture, histories of science and medicine, and the macabre; and “In the Same Vein,” a pedagogical podcast that interviews scholars in health humanities and bioethics alongside University of Rochester students.