Disease and representation: images of illness from madness to AIDS

Abstract

Sander L. Gilman, whose pioneering work on the history of stereotypes has become a model for scholars in many fields, here examines the images that society creates of disease and its victims. In fourteen essays linked by a concern with the depiction of illness in culture and medicine, Gilman addresses such diverse topics as the "mad" patient of the Middle Ages, art created by the mentally ill, the interaction between Western and Chinese medical traditions, and the representation of the AIDS patient.

Contents

Depicting disease : a theory of representing illness -- Madness and representation : toward a history of visualizing madness -- The rediscovery of the body : Leonardo's first image of human sexuality and disease -- Masturbation and anxiety : Henry Mackenzie, Heinrich von Kleist, William James -- Images of the asylum : Charles Dickens and Charles Davies -- The insane see the insane : Richard Dadd -- The insane see the insane : Vincent Van Gogh -- The science of visualizing the insane : Charles Darwin -- Medical colonialism and disease : Lam Qua and the creation of a westernized medical iconography in nineteenth-century China -- Opera, homosexualtiy, and models of disease : Richard Strauss's Salome in the context of images of disease in the fin de siècle -- Constructing the image of the appropriate therapist : the struggle of psychiatry with psychoanalysis -- Constructing schizophrenia as a category of mental illness -- Seeing the schizophrenic : on the "bizarre" in psychiatry and art -- Seeing the AIDS patient.