Public History and the Public Understanding of Medicine

Historians are only beginning to assess the impact of vast numbers of phenomena being made widely, easily and cheaply visible, especially on the worldwide web. ‘Phenomena’ might sound vague, but I use it deliberately to evoke the extraordinary scope of what can now be seen, and is relevant in some way to the past and its study. Until the eighteenth century, for example, naturalistic images of human embryos were unknown. In subsequent centuries they became accessible to specialists, and to collectors, such as those who bought, saw, and admired the wax anatomical figures that strove for perfect verisimilitude. Nowadays, everyone in technologically privileged countries has pictures of their own offspring in the womb and the sight of a human embryo is not particularly remarkable. Yet when Life magazine published the famous photographs by Lennart Nilsson of human embryos in 1965, it was a much-discussed event. There was a sense that something extraordinary had happened precisely because what had been hidden from most people was made visible. The internet has exponentially increased such visibility. There are complex histories to be told here, including about notions of gender and family, which have the potential to touch huge swathes of the population now that assisted reproduction is both experienced and discussed in both popular and broadsheet culture. Thus we might quite properly assert that the history of embryology is a suitable subject for public history and that one way of making it compelling to the public is through a website that contains many images of embryos over long periods of time.

Aesthetics · Art · Epistemology · Genealogy · Media studies · Naturalism · Population · Sight · Sociology · Subject (documents) · Computer Science · Historical Studies on Reproduction, Gender, Health, and Societal Changes · History · Philosophy