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The place of visual images and image-production in the history of scientific and medical knowledge is a new area of inquiry reflecting growing interest in the changing relations between scientific practice and theory, pictures and truth claims, art and "non-art", and science and the public. This course explores changing uses of visual media (drawings, etchings, sketches, photographs, diagrams, X Ray images, computer-generated images, film) in the life sciences and medicine from the late Renaissance to the present day. In each lecture we will look at and discuss selected images representing different objects of knowledge: the human body, microscopic organisms, plants and animals, physiological processes, anthropological subjects, the brain, disease, and the environment. Some of the questions we will investigate are: Why do producers of knowledge make and circulate visual images? In what sense are scientific visualizations gendered? How and why are graphical representations used to communicate scientific and medical knowledge among different individuals and social groups (e.g., physicians, researchers, lab technicians, students, judges, magazine editors, science journalists, children) through different channels (e.g., textbooks, slide lectures, newspapers and magazines, courtrooms, books, television, film)?
COURSE FORMAT: Seminar
Level: UGRD Credit: 1 Gen Ed Area Dept: SBS HIST Grading Mode: Graded
Prerequisites: NONE
Last Updated on MAR-19-2004
Copyright Wesleyan University, Middletown, Connecticut, 06459