Art Hx: Visual and Medical Legacies of British Colonialism – Mapping the Convergences of Art and Medicine in the British Empire

Image Credit: After Abraham James, The Torrid Zone, or, Blessings of Jamaica, 1800. The Wellcome Collection. Public Domain

Image Credit: John Bartholomew, British empire throughout the world exhibited in one view, 1850s. Library of Congress Geography and Map Division. Public Domain

Art Hx

Illuminating the historical and ongoing entanglements of art, colonialism, race, and medicine

Art Hx—by tessellating various materials, research specialities, and methods via a unique digital platform—unravels the different modes by which visual imagery and medical history have, in combination, been accessory to racist and imperialist endeavors.

Recent Constellations

At Art Hx, Constellations bring images together to envisage their often elided or
undetectable thematic, visual, and material networks. Each Constellation relates to one of the project’s three frameworks: Cultivating Care, Pathologies of Difference, and Medicalized Space.

Medicalized Space

Colonial Visuality and the Expert Gaze in Visual Cultures of “Tropical Medicine”

By: Sadie Levy Gale, 2022-2023 Art Hx Interpretive Fellow Visual propaganda[…]

Pathologies of Difference

Colonial Connections: Race and Medicine across Continents

By: Michaela Clark, 2022-2023 Art Hx Interpretive Fellow The Healer (1916)[…]

Illustrations of the Mode of Preparing the Indian Opium Intended for the Chinese Market / from Drawings Made by Captain Walter S. Sherwill. 1851. Publication: London : Maclure, Macdonald & Macgregor lith.

Medicalized Space

Opium Factory at Patna: The Stacking Room

By Nancy Ai M. Arch Candidate, Princeton University and Art Hx[…]