Public Bodies: The Nude and Public Health in Nineteenth-Century France
This dissertation examines the ways that medicine, visuality, and sexuality were inextricably linked in nineteenth-century France through medical illustrations, photographs, and paintings. It reveals how nonscientific cultural beliefs were encoded as biology in nineteenth-century medical rhetoric, then naturalized in visual representations. Chapter one demonstrates the radically different implications of bathing for men and women through analysis of depictions of male bathers. Unlike images of female bathers, which emphasize a dangerous form of sexuality, visualizations of male bathers connote strength, virility, and civic virtue. The second chapter links nineteenth-century eroticism, vision, and health through Gustave Courbet’s Origin of the World. It shows how the new form of vision offered by the vaginal speculum, with vision’s link to scientific knowledge, enhanced the eroticism of genital observation by offering the promise of a penetrative gaze. Chapter three uses medical images of nineteenth-century hermaphrodites to reveal how illustrations naturalized medical rhetoric by representing it in individual bodies. Rather than promoting the images that most clearly communicate the anatomy of individual patients, doctors preferred those that best reflected their own biological theories. The final chapter focuses on depictions of the danse arabe to reveal how colonial systems of dominance, in both France’s state-run medical apparatus and Parisian Orientalist painting, exploited the rhetoric of vision to establish a series of interlocking and self-reinforcing fictions as observable reality. It demonstrates how myth, figured as biological knowledge, invades the bodies of observed individuals and justifies violent disruptions between the explanation of those bodies and the experience of them.
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