Portraits and Pathologies

Images of diseases made their entry into publications on human pathology during the first decades of the nineteenth century. Operating within the interdisciplinary field between history of art and history of medicine, this chapter argues that artistic strategies and art theoretical concepts initially probed in the realm of portraiture and the ways of seeing they promoted were highly significant for the development of medical modes of perception and image production. The points of departure to tease out issues of portraiture relevant to the medical image are two late eighteenth-century pendant portraits by Jacques-Louis David which exaggerate the characterization of their sitters. A detailed genealogy of the “clinical picture” remains to be written, but by analyzing the links between portraiture and pathological images, the chapter demonstrates that the notion of the “clinical picture” is not as self-evident as it suggests.