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Anyone who has opened an old medical missionary journal has seen them: page after page of blurry black-and-white photographs, each showing Chinese people suffering from horrifying, body-desecrating afflictions--elephantiasis, leprosy, massive tumors. The overall effect of these photographs is to produce, at least for the habitual reader of medical journals, a sense that China was not only a spectacularly diseased place, but also a place so abject that disease could easily be turned into a spectacle for the Western eye.
In her pioneering new study, Larissa N. Heinrich suggests that the impact of these images went far beyond medical circles. The central contention of The Afterlife of Images is that medical illustrations were key artifacts that helped shape China's identity as the "Sick Man of Asia" in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Furthermore, Heinrich argues that medical images were crucial in informing Chinese conceptions of their own identity in an age of Western imperialism.
In tracing this deleterious "afterlife of images," Heinrich does not limit herself to the easy target of colonial-era medical photography. Instead, she considers a broad range of images, including Chinese woodblock illustrations, oil paintings, anatomical atlases, and lantern slides of microbes. Heinrich's analytical approach is equally wide ranging, drawing from a variety of disciplines,...