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    Flesh poems: Henry Tonks and the art of surgery

    Biernoff, Suzannah (2010) Flesh poems: Henry Tonks and the art of surgery. Visual Culture in Britain 11 (1), pp. 25-47. ISSN 1471-4787.

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    Abstract

    This article focuses on Henry Tonks’ pastel studies of wounded First World War servicemen before, after, and during facial surgery. Viewed alongside archival photographs of the same patients from the Cambridge Hospital at Aldershot and The Queen’s Hospital in Sidcup, Tonks’ drawings disturb the conventions both of medical illustration and portraiture: they are discussed here in relation to the visual cultures of modern medicine (in particular nineteenth and twentieth-century traditions of medical illustration and photography) and the artist’s own thoughts on artistic objectivity and beauty. For Tonks, good drawing was tactile: without this sensibility and skill, he believed, the draughtsman’s art was like playing a piano without hearing the notes. In light of Tonks’ wartime collaboration with the surgeon Harold Gillies this paper explores the hypothesis that the history of surgery – and to some extent the history of medical representation – is a history of touch as much as a product of visual practices and conventions.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    Additional Information: The research for this article was supported by a Wellcome Trust Research Leave Award [no. 082864] Published version available via Gold Open Access at http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3158130/?tool=pmcentrez
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences > School of Historical Studies
    Research Centres and Institutes: Gender and Sexuality, Birkbeck (BiGS), Social Research, Birkbeck Institute for (BISR)
    Depositing User: Suzannah Biernoff
    Date Deposited: 15 Nov 2012 11:49
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 17:00
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/5647

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