Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration, and the Homuncular Subject

Description

Lavishly illustrated with more than 100 images, Body Modern imaginatively explores the relationship between conceptual image, image production, and embodied experience, offering the first in-depth critical study of Fritz Kahn and his visual rhetoric. Michael Sappol concludes that Kahn's illustrations pose profound and unsettling epistemological questions about the construction and performance of the self.

Michael Sappol is fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. He is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America and Dream Anatomy, and the editor of A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire and Hidden Treasure: The National Library of Medicine.

"The chance meeting of Popular Mechanics and Gray's Anatomy on a dissecting table, Fritz Kahn's cutaway views of our inner workings expose far more than blood, guts, and bones. Taking Kahn's delirious illustrations as his jumping-off point, Michael Sappol uses his vast historical erudition, just enough theory, and a prose style that cuts like a knife to lay bare the visual unconscious of the Machine Age. Delving deeper, he discovers the self, a cognitive widget turned out by Modernism's philosophical assembly line. Witty, incisive, and impeccably researched, Body Modern is an X-ray of our image world in its early years, before the deluge."-Mark Dery, author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams "The book is nicely illustrated and the history of our relationship between biology and mythology is brilliantly addressed."-The Daily Heller "Densely academic, yet provocative enough for a lay person to extract some meaning."-Santa Fe New Mexican "The merits of Michael Sappol's study are numerous. Sappol gives a first-rate overview of the key themes and forms of Kahn's editorial achievements as well as the manifold ways it was appropriated in other countries and cultures."-Leonardo Reviews "The author's lucid commentaries provide excellent guidance through the forest of Kahn's topics, ranging from anatomy to architecture, and from physiology to thermodynamics." -Bulletin of the History of Medicine "An intellectually important book that is delightfully well written." -ISIS