HESCAH Lecture: Mechthild Fend | "Portraits and Pathologies: Likenesses and clinical pictures in turn of the nineteenth-century France"

Join us for a lecture by Mechthild Fend. Focusing on turn of the nineteenth-century France, from the eve of the Revolution to the Napoleonic period, this talk seeks to explore relations between portraits of people and portraits of diseases. During this period both physical and mental disorders started to be visually recorded in a systematic manner. At the same time, portraiture was a very popular medium and I will argue that definitions and practices of portraiture evolving around the notion of character were crucial for the development of the pathological image meant to capture the “characteristic traits” of a disease.