Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration, and the Homuncular Subject by Michael Sappol (review)

The approximately fifty black-and-white figures interspersed in the text together with fourteen color plates represent the enormous breadth of Kahn's images very well, and the author's lucid commentaries provide excellent guidance through the forest of Kahn's topics, ranging from anatomy to architecture, and from physiology to thermodynamics. Only later did he become famous in the United States, where he, the son of a Jewish physician, fled after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. [...]for an understanding of Kahn's visuality, more important than the Popular Science Monthly are the Berliner Illustrierte Zeitung, the Uhu, and the heavily illustrated books of the popular science publisher Franck in Stuttgart (where Kahn also published his first books). Altogether I can recommend this book to all historians of modern science and medicine, and to students of the visual culture of functional scientific illustration as a thorough exegesis of Kahn's imagery and its broader impact.