On his book Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration, and the Homuncular Subject
Cover Interview of July 04, 2017
In a nutshell
Body Modern focuses
on the history of a peculiar kind of imagery of the human body: the conceptual
scientific illustration. Primarily found in America and Germany between 1915
and 1960, images of the body modern also traveled to the Soviet Union, China, Latin
America, and many other countries, as well as across time; the book follows them
to the twenty-first century, where they regularly appear in videos, training
manuals, websites, textbooks and magazines—our media environment and experience.
To clarify: Body Modern is not about
pictures that teach lessons about the anatomical structures of the body, but about
pictures that attempt to entertain and instruct readers with visual explanations
of the workings of the human body, using metaphors, sequences, analogies,
diagrammatic elements, cross-sections, allusions, playful situations, and
juxtapositions. To us, such images seem familiar, something that has always
been around, but the genre was novel and remarkable when it was invented in Chicago
in the first decades of the 20th century.
Its first great exponent was Fritz Kahn
(1888-1968), a German-Jewish physician and popular science writer. In
collaboration with a cadre of commercial artists, Kahn brilliantly deployed and
redeployed—he was a great recycler and repurposer of his own pictures as well
as those of his predecessors and contemporaries—thousands of illustrations, in
books, articles and posters that reached a mass audience in Weimar Germany and
around the world.
Head, thorax, and abdomen, all contain
gases and help to keep the body afloat in Der
Mensch Gesund und Krank (Man in Health and Sickness), vol. 1 (1939).
Body Modern
bombards the reader with images from the works of Kahn because Kahn’s pictures were
one very remarkable, but now mostly forgotten, part of a pictorial/media regime
change, a cultural revolution that aimed to remake the relationship between
text, image, and body, and remake, perhaps re-engineer, human subjectivity.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
Body Modern focuses on the history of a peculiar kind of imagery of the human body: the conceptual scientific illustration. Primarily found in America and Germany between 1915 and 1960, images of the body modern also traveled to the Soviet Union, China, Latin America, and many other countries, as well as across time; the book follows them to the twenty-first century, where they regularly appear in videos, training manuals, websites, textbooks and magazines—our media environment and experience.
To clarify: Body Modern is not about pictures that teach lessons about the anatomical structures of the body, but about pictures that attempt to entertain and instruct readers with visual explanations of the workings of the human body, using metaphors, sequences, analogies, diagrammatic elements, cross-sections, allusions, playful situations, and juxtapositions. To us, such images seem familiar, something that has always been around, but the genre was novel and remarkable when it was invented in Chicago in the first decades of the 20th century.
Its first great exponent was Fritz Kahn (1888-1968), a German-Jewish physician and popular science writer. In collaboration with a cadre of commercial artists, Kahn brilliantly deployed and redeployed—he was a great recycler and repurposer of his own pictures as well as those of his predecessors and contemporaries—thousands of illustrations, in books, articles and posters that reached a mass audience in Weimar Germany and around the world.
Body Modern bombards the reader with images from the works of Kahn because Kahn’s pictures were one very remarkable, but now mostly forgotten, part of a pictorial/media regime change, a cultural revolution that aimed to remake the relationship between text, image, and body, and remake, perhaps re-engineer, human subjectivity.