This book focuses on the entanglement of the fine arts and visual culture with medical developments, homeopathy, and the Lebensreform movement in the Germanic and Nordic countries at the turn of the last century. It explores the ways in which the visual arts both mirrored new developments in the health sciences and were central agents in picturing the body for professional and popular audiences. Technologies of envisioning - from film to pop-up books - are considered in their aesthetic and ideological dimensions.

The period under consideration was one of exceptional transformation in medical theory and care. Chapters explore how artists in the Germanic and Nordic countries responded to an immersive culture of health at a time of urbanization and advancements in cellular and pathological anatomy, innovative surgical techniques, new medical technologies, and the flourishing of hygiene movements and exhibitions that emphasized visual information. Essays examine visualizations of healthy and diseased bodies, interior organs, the healing impact of sun on skin, and the particular conditions of the maternal body and the disabled. Physiological health choices are also considered in their association with national well-being, moral civic discourse, and social welfare.

The ten case studies of visual culture in this book present material on a range of topics central to debates at the time and in later scholarship on the health humanities: the importance of hygienic education for children, hospital modernization, abortion and eugenics, fluctuating attitudes towards doctors, disputes between advocates of homeopathy and allopathy, vegetarianism, the causes and implications of tuberculosis and venereal disease, and the place of social welfare, gender, and race within public hygiene.

Patricia G. Berman is the Feldberg Professor of Art at Wellesley College. Also serving as Professor II at the University of Oslo, she facilitated a multi-year project entitled “Munch, Modernism, and Modernity.” Her books and exhibition catalogues include Munch: Inner Fire (Munch Museum and Palazzo Reale, 2025); Munch|Warhol, and the Multiple Print (2013, American-Scandinavian Foundation); A Fine Regard: Essays in Honor of Kirk Varnedoe (Ashgate, 2008); James Ensor: Christ's Entry into Brussels in 1889, (Getty Museum Studies on Art, 2002); and Edvard Munch and Women: Image and Myth (Art Services International, 1995).

Marsha Morton is Professor of Art History at Pratt Institute, USA. A specialist in German and Austrian cultural history with a focus on interdisciplinary topics of art, anthropology, science, and music, her books include Max Klinger and Wilhelmine Culture (2014) and the co-edited anthology The Arts Entwined (2000). She is also a co-editor and contributing author to Visual Culture and Pandemic Disease Since 1750: Capturing Contagion (2023).