Watch the webinar.

Speaker: Christine Slobogin, University of Rochester Medical Center (see bio below)

Plastic surgery in twentieth-century Britain was a medical discipline with deep ties to art, artists, and art history. It was also a field still in the process of creating its reputation and its archives. This talk, based on material from Slobogin's forthcoming book, examines these archives, focusing in particular on the works on paper held within these collections by two artists: Diana "Dickie" Orpen and Percy Hennell. Plastic surgeons depended upon the drawings and photographs made by these and other medical illustrators to craft certain narratives about their field and their surgical practice.

In addition to outlining an art history of plastic surgery during this period, this talk engages with the affective parameters of archival objects, and with what working as a historian involves when done within potentially traumatic spaces. Paying particular attention to the emotional dimensions and effects of this visual culture and the ways in which it is archived and framed by the discipline of plastic surgery – then and now – this research explores not only what it meant to make art in a surgical space, but also what it means to study these affecting paper objects in the archive today.

You can attend this event in person or stream via zoom using the link below.