The Afterlife of Medical Casts from the UCL Pathology Collection

Engaging as artist and researcher with two collections of plaster cast objects from the UCL Pathology Collections: The Noel Phrenology collection of life and death masks and the Great Ormond Street Hospital collection of children’s body parts. Both date from the mid 19th century and use plaster as a pre-photographic demonstration technique. As a pre-automated method of spatializing the body, these casts are life size analogues of the body’s 3D volume, but they were made for very different interpretative frameworks: On the one hand to preserve anatomical pathologies for medical anamnesis (illustrating diseases that have reached stages we see less often today due to more sophisticated methods of diagnosis and treatment), on the other to extract pseudo-scientific signs from the shape of a head in order to evaluate its moral faculties according to a system of character types (retrospectively or in form of a prognosis). Both have photographic off-springs with different effects on society, medicine and history.

This chapter originated in the conference presentation:
Becoming Image: Medicine and the Algorithmic Gaze, An interdisciplinary symposium, Centre for Medical Imaging/Digital Insides, UCL Anthropology, London, 23.05.18:
"Going into the body means going into the image, a collapse of distinctions between inside and outside, object and process, observer and observed."

• https://www.ucl.ac.uk/culture/ucl-pathol...