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Portraying skin disease: Robert Carswell's dermatological watercolours

Contribution and Context: This chapter looks at the barely known pathological watercolours that Robert Carswell, holder of the first chair of pathological anatomy in England, made during the 1830s in various Parisian hospitals. The article is part of an edited volume which is the first comprehensive approach to skin from the perspective of medical history and the medical humanities. Within a section on “Skin, Disease and Visual Culture”, Fend’s contribution demonstrates the significance of art historical methodology within a medical humanities context and demonstrates the possibilities of close visual and formal analysis in interpreting medical images.

Research imperatives and process: Drawing on the historical archive of Carswell’s pathological watercolours held in UCL Special Collections, the article challenges both the art historical notion of the portrait and the medical notion of the patient and represents Fend’s larger research interests in the ways images function at the very intersection of histories of art, medicine and science. Fend discusses the drawings in the context of early dermatological studies and imagery, arguing that dermatology was a genuinely visual discipline engaged in surface scrutiny.