BioHistory Seminar: "Picturing Fatness, c. 1850-1998"

Presentation by Anne Katrine Kleberg Hansen, postdoc at Copenhagen Centre for Health Research in the Humanities (CoRe), Saxo Institute.

PLEASE NOTICE THAT THE LOCATION HAS BEEN ALTERED TO THE CONFERENCE ROOM IN BUILDING 23, 5TH FLOOR, KUA1.

In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s the Danish physician Ejnar Jarløv (1888–1961) worked on establishing a typography of fatness using clinical photography.

Visual representations forming knowledge
Anne Katrine Kleberg Hansen will present her project, Picturing Fatness, c. 1850-1998. The project departs from the basic notion that visual representations contribute to inform and form medical knowledge rather than just reflect the state of knowledge at a given time in history.

Fatness in the history of medical research
As such, differing types of medical visuals – for example, charts or photography – are not just different ways of illustrating the same problem or phenomenon, rather they can point to the various ways in which fatness historically has been conceptualized and practiced within medical research.

Images of fatness
In this talk, Anne Katrine will present some preliminary reflections on how photography was used to establish typologies of fatness in the first half of the 20th century - and on the role of photography in medical case records of patients with the diagnosis “adipositas”.

All interested are welcome to join the seminar.