Visualizing Surgery: Surgeons’ Use of Images c.1600-present

This chapter addresses the various ways surgeons have made use of images in their theory and practice from the sixteenth century to the present day. Over this period, surgeons have adopted numerous visualizing strategies to market their skills, define their professional identities, and guide and assess their interventions. Here we explore a variety of these images, from woodcut illustrations to X-ray scans, as well as the ways in which historians of medicine and science, art historians, and sociologists have conceptualized these visual representations in the wake of the ‘visual turn’ of late twentieth-century historical scholarship.