La fragmentación y el museo: el procesamiento de los cuerpos femeninos en el discurso médico fin-de-siècle

Abstract

Despite the strong belief of “revealed truth” attributed to fin-de-siècle repositories of medical images—abundant during the 19th century— the production of anatomical specimens exhibited in these nineteenth-century museums involves a process of fragmentation and isolation from the bodies that originated them. Indeed, the triple objective pursued by the creation of these venues —educational, clinical, and diagnostic— necessitated a simplification process that aimed to enhance the clarity and functionality of the images. In this way, it becomes evident that, far from being a faithful representation of reality, these images are composed with the intervention of a lens, and not only with the photographical. There is no room for the unnecessary; each included element serves a purpose within a meticulously elaborated scheme of significance. Today, the repositories created at the end of the 19th century in the Salpêtrière in Paris and at the beginning of the 20th century in the Hospital de las Alienadas in Buenos Aires have been partially preserved. Over time, the isolation initiated by the scalpel or photographic shot has expanded, creating empty spaces. White parentheses within a closed system: the emergence of the superfluous. The emergence of elements that are foreign and irrelevant to the system of meaning enables us to examine the genre of medical realism—aligned with the spirit of positivist science—in the proposed corpus and its connection with the construction of images. This analysis demonstrates the presence and consolidation of a specific aesthetic that draws inspiration from the compositional principles of art history.