Health and illness: images of difference

Hardback

Focusing on how images of ""beauty"" and ""ugliness"" can be used to reconstruct the visual history of the artificial boundaries between the ""healthy"" body and the ""ill"" body, this book looks at the construction of visual stereotypes or images of difference. Specifically, it explores how cultural fantasies of ""health"" and ""illness"" come to be identified and defined by visual aesthetic criteria. The healthy becomes seen as the beautiful, and the ill as the ugly. Equally important, this discourse on pathology and the ugly comes to be employed in many other visual constructions of the period, such as those of gender, class and ""race"".The author concentrates on cultural objects from the history of ""Phantom of the Opera"" to Mark Twain and Sarah Bernhardt. Parallel medical traditions are outlined, from the history of cosmetic surgery to the history of hysteria. The book also examines AIDS representations across cultures in terms of the aesthetics of the represented body.Sander Gilman is the author of ""Disease and Representation"", ""The Jew's Body"" and ""Inscribing the Other"".