Zur Geschichte der Psychiatrie

medical texts. It is one of the major resources in measuring the shifts in perception present within systems that claim to represent the "realities" of the world. It is thus not merely of interest to parallel one world of aesthetic objects to another (as Glandien does in his work on Messerschmidt and his influence in contemporary art) or to draw the internal history of the function of photography in medicine (as does Taureck). What one must do is to use this material to reconstruct (as far as is possible) the world seen through these visual paradigms, to lay out the ideology inherent in the visual structures employed, to see with the eyes and the mind of the present the limitations of the past's perception of its world. All of this is missing from these dissertations. But what is present is the raw material for such work. To be blunt-these students have done the spadework for a much more complicated history of medical iconography which remains to be written. A model for this new history of medical iconography has appeared recently. Going well beyond the art-internal work of art historians such as Heckscher, William Schupbach has presented a study of one painting, Rembrandt's anatomy, and has shown how a series of discourses must be unravelled before the painting makes any real sense. First, he explores the formalistic structure of the medical iconography, illustrating on this mechanical level the iconographic nature of the painting. He then asks the basic question of the iconography-what is the underlying ideology which the formalistic presentation wishes to reflect? He finds this ideology in the public nature of medical education and its heavily religious overlay. To do this, he must present a third discourse, that of the "idea" of the body and of anatomy. He shows, in a tour-de-force, that these discourses are not separate, not isolated one from the other; that the aesthetic object has a function in social history, in the public sphere, in the world of ideas, and that each in turn illuminates and is illuminated by the work of art. This does not vitiate the work of art as aesthetic object, but it does destroy the oldest fallacy of both art history and the history of medical iconography-that there is a special and unique place for the aesthetic object in any history of perception. If this special place does exist, it is as …