The Epic Anatomy of the Body. New Historical-Humanistic Approaches to the Medical Image

In current historiography, the interdisciplinary study of history, visual arts, and medicine is no longer a novelty. The last decades have brought challenging works to the attention of researchers, highlighting, in particular, affinities between the three fields. Offering a different dimension to medical problems and overcoming chronological, geographical and disciplinary limitations, such books and studies broaden the horizon of knowledge, revealing the effects of medicine on society from multiple perspectives: cultural, political, economic, religious and intellectual. As the innovation in medicine is increasingly accelerated, and the results of scientific research in the field of biomedicine are challenging (often generating ethical debates and moral dilemmas), works like Anatomy of the Medical Image: Knowledge Production and Transfiguration from the Renaissance to Today offers the opportunity to assess the changing role of medical practices over “longue durée” of history. They contribute to a better understanding of the past and a more profound and fuller interrogation of the present. The thirteen contributions in the volume edited by Brill under the auspices of the Clio Medica series show how the historical approach, the visual material and the medical subject can work together.