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Surrounded by a glut of images featuring erotocized youthful bodies to purvey the latest commodities, we could well use a history of visual imagery dealing with “the relationship between health and disease, beauty and ugliness” (p. 174). Sander Gilman
provides us with a selective guide through Western representations of the human body, all of which seem to be based on the binary oppositions of beauty/health, ugliness/disease. He goes on to consider the way these schemata function in illustrated medical texts and in books which begin by positing ideal types of beauty and end by becoming racist. Lest we think we are exempt from the coercion of this cultural baggage Gilman ends with an analysis of contemporary AIDS public health posters, showing how they eschew images of the diseased body for representations of “the body at risk and even the ill body as beautiful, even erotic” (p. 118). While “death threatens, …dying itself is absent” (p. 119). Our “anxieties about illness are replaced by control over the image,” but “the illnesses constructed always seem to be beyond control” (p. 32).
Gilman takes us on an idiosyncratic yet ever fascinating journey through the way that visual imagery develops into a forum for the representation of otherness. We are surely not them, not the ugly, the diseased, or the mentally ill. The latter have been the subject of photography since the 1850s when Dr. High W. Diamond became the “Pioneer of Psychiatric Photography.” Diamond assures his audience that “the Photographer secures with unerring accuracy the external phenomenon of each passion, as the really certain indication of internal derangement” (Gilman, 1976, p. 20). Gilman, who previously edited a collection of Diamond's photographs, scrutinizes this naive faith in the objectivity of photographic images in a chapter on “The History of the Illustrated History of Medicine.” Jean-Martin Charcot, for example, assumed that “just as pathology in the body could be measured by physical signs