This collection is focused on depictions and representations of infirmity. An impressive range of mostly visual sources (a key exception being Peter Howard's contribution on medical language in sermons) from physical contexts is presented: statues on tombs (Jonathan K. Nelson); paintings on the walls of hospitals and displayed in cathedrals (Maggie Bell and Jenni Kuuliala); a Franciscan vitae collection (Diana Bullen Presciutti); a surgical manual (Paolo Savoia); and the presepi figurines from Nativity scenes (Danielle Carrabino), to name only some. The collection is richly illustrated, image and analysis working in tandem. Whether the chapter in question studies a range of media (John Henderson's and Carrabino's articles are particularly wide-ranging), or focuses on one specific object of study, the result is rewarding. Mobilizing such varied materials for the study of health and healing is a valuable approach, reflecting the cultural turn in the history of health which sees scholars scrutinizing novel sources that may not at one time have been seen as sufficiently medical. This collection shows how rich and vital the visual culture of health was in the past, and how intrinsic it was to contemporary people in understanding and navigating their experience of health. Adopting this perspective can only benefit our understanding of the history of health and healing.
The precociously urbanized (in European terms anyway) setting of Renaissance Italy is an obvious choice for the series in which this book is published (The Body in the City), although it is notable that the book focuses almost exclusively on Northern and Central Italian locations, with the South largely unexamined. With a collection so tightly focused on a particular time and place, one might reasonably query how far it is pertinent to scholars of other regions and periods. The methodological approaches utilized are highly transferable, particularly in the focus on visual culture described above. The explicit engagement with the practice of retrospective diagnosis is to be welcomed when it can sometimes be the elephant in the room in studies of historical health. The lively debate between contributors Jonathan K. Nelson and Michael Stolberg, in two chapters which neatly bookend the volume, shows that addressing this contested topic head-on is necessary, not least due to its sheer ubiquity amongst the modern medical community. It also has the potential to produce intriguing results, even if it is ultimately a problematic pursuit. Retrospective diagnosis transcends the periodization and geographic location of historical study of health, and the approaches here are important additions to the ongoing debate.
There is a heavily religious emphasis in much of the material here, with religious settings providing most of the objects of study. Indeed, in premodern medicine there was only a paper wall between religion and medicine. Even ostensibly secular texts—the manuals of surgery examined by Savoia—are understood fully in the context of the Battle of Lepanto, a cataclysmic clash between Christianity and Islam, with the experience of pain for a Turkish Muslim soldier depicted very differently to that of a Christian soldier. And vice versa: in a religious source—the votive panels offered to a Marian shrine presented by Frederika Jacobs—medics are shown in combination with religious sources of healing.
The specific circumstances of Renaissance Italy, pre- and post-Council of Trent are given careful consideration in this volume. However, here the collection is very much rooted in its chosen time and place and the seismic shifts in Christianity, and concomitant understandings of health, healing, and the body that took place at this time are conspicuously absent; the focus of this collection is decidedly Italian Catholic. Such a comparison would be outside the remit of this volume, but since the ground of Renaissance Italy is well-trodden in the history of health, comparative approaches will bear useful fruit in the future, particularly when utilizing new approaches to the history of health, as this collection does. In the introduction, the editors describe Representing Infirmity as a contribution to a still fairly new specialism. In its stated aim of developing approaches to the use of visual sources in the depiction of ill health, it will provide an important benchmark for scholars who will find the methodologies and objects of study here a source of great interest and inspiration.
