Beneath the Skin and Back to Life: Wax Models and the Visualization of Disease

Medicine records and diseminates our results through a variety of media: texts, specimens, images and reproductions. This talk will consider the visual medium of three-dimensional medical wax imagery. It begins with a consideration of how medical images catch the attention and direct the eye of the observer towards specific aspects of the human body. The talk will then address several specific questions. At what point in medical history did directing the viewer’s attention became a priority? What were the specific potentials of wax as a medical image medium? How, and on which aspects of the healthy and pathological body, was the viewer’s gaze focused when studying medical wax models and moulages? And finally, what is the meaning of these highly impressive objects as medical historical sources today?