Ludmilla Jordanova

Portraiture, Beauty, Pain

A tall man in a cream suit is sitting awkwardly in a dark brown chair. His head is tilted to one side, and the expression on his face is hard to read, but it is certainly pensive, preoccupied. He is glancing away to one side. Both arms seem awkwardly placed, the fingers of the left one are in a distinctly odd position. His feet, clad in light brown shoes, are visible through a glass-topped table on which there is a small tumbler.

Historical Vision in a Digital Age

Practising history in a digital age is a complex operation, making it essential that we reflect critically on its opportunities and challenges not only for research but also for undergraduate teaching, research supervision and public history. One complexity is the highly diverse ways in which digital technology and the internet in particular impinge on our lives. It may be useful to distinguish between information retrieval as in library catalogues, digitized resources, such as those that make large amounts of printed text available, and large projects that offer the possibility of managing data sets of significant size. In addition many museums and galleries provide elaborate websites, which do considerably more than listing opening hours, current exhibitions and travel information. They contain research on artefacts, as well as information about specific items within the collection – both are invaluable for scholarly research. In practice, these are not watertight categories, and it is worth reminding ourselves of the diverse range of behaviours involved when we think about history and ‘the digital’, including blogging and tweeting. We might also take our cue from fields such as historical geography, where reflection on GIS, for example, is well established.1 Indeed, digital culture provides a welcome opportunity for historians to reflect on their relations with a range of other disciplines. A further reason why reflecting on ‘the digital’ is so important is that it might help stem the fragmentation of history as a discipline. Already there is an extensive specialist literature in digital humanities and digital history, which requires a certain level of expertise to grasp fully.2 This specialization is possible partly because most historians are more interested in what digital technology can do for them than in reflecting on its implications. But it is worth laying instrumental considerations aside in favour of a more engaged and critical mode, which is what Tim Hitchcock is advocating. We have to go far beyond the limitations of reading texts in digital form, however. Hitchcock has done his colleagues a service in laying bare some of the economic, technical and political issues embedded in digitization projects. He makes a number of assertions about the nature of contemporary historical practice and its differences from scholarly activities in earlier decades that invite careful consideration. Among the most

Public History and the Public Understanding of Medicine: the Case of Embryology

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. The website ‘Making Visible Embryos’ does just this, although it does not frame itself as ‘public history’. Funded by the Wellcome Trust, it might be seen as ‘public understanding of medicine’, or indeed ‘knowledge transfer’. This collaboration between the University of Cambridge and one of the world’s most important medical charities was authored, if that is the right word, by Tatjana Buklijas and Nick Hopwood and it is certainly designed to be highly accessible. As the home page explains,

Book Review: Madame Tussaud and the History of Waxworks:

not as satisfying as the ones on Mosse’s work on fascism. Taken as a whole, however, this volume reveals how thoroughly all Mosse’s views are accepted now, and how deep was the impact that this exciting historian had on German historiography in the twentieth century. True, other historians, mostly other émigrés from Germany, worked in the same fields as he and often came to similar conclusions. Yet, noone today reads German history as most people did in the 1950s and 1960s, and Mosse played a central role in that transformation.