Medical Photography in Chile: Approaches to Women’s Health and Reproductive Bodies

Jadwiga E. Pieper Mooney, History, University of Arizona

How has medical photography informed the medical gaze, the training of health professionals, and the changing definitions of health and illness in Chile in the early decades of the twentieth century? How did it fit the goals of the medical institution, or helped in the framing of specific goals? This study seeks to contribute answers to these questions by exploring the spaces between seeing and knowing, prioritizing gender as a category of analysis. It explores physicians’ use of photography in their approaches to women’s health, and connects doctors’ modes of thinking about reproduction and reproductive bodies to gendered expectations, medical practice, and health policies.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 141. Medical Photography, Images, and Interpretive Power in the Americas: Gendered Perspectives