Representing Health and Illness: Thoughts for the Twenty-First Century

In their critical paper on images in the health sciences, Roger Cooter and Claudia Stein pointed out the limits of visualisation and representation in the existing literature in the public representation of health and illness. They focus on the complex and multilayered field of medical representations as the site where levels of epistemic, philosophical and political presuppositions provide insight into the interpreter’s historical position. From a close focus on medical (or even public health) representations as a reflection of a partial worldview, to the historical embeddedness that they suggest is the key to understanding the limitations of all visual hermeneutics in the sphere of health and illness: