Picturing Fatness c. 1850-1998

- A history of how visual depictions have shaped medical knowledge

Postdoctoral project by Anne Katrine Kleberg Hansen, Copenhagen Centre for Health Research in the Humanities.

Anne Katrine aims to write a history of how visual depictions have shaped medical knowledge. 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.

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.

The project has been funded with 1.6 million DKK by the Carlsberg Foundation.

Read the article Exploring images of fatness about the project at core.ku.dk.