Sick jokes: Visual histories of humour, health and the body: 70

In the modern era, artists, patients and healthcare professionals have turned to humour to visualise medical themes or to reimagine the medicalised body. Through thoughtful and colourful analysis, Sick jokes shows how visual humour can both illuminate and distort the realities of health, ill health and the inner workings of the medical world. Placing visual humour at the heart of medical and health histories, Sick jokes shows how humorous art not only reflects but also shapes cultural views of illness, care and the body.The volume collates ten comic case studies, analysing visual materials that range from the ephemeral (seaside postcards, sketchbooks cartoons and HIV/AIDS zines) to the canonical (artwork by Edvard Munch and James Gillray), and from the site-specific (satirical performances by disabled artists) to the digitally native (instructional films for doctors and Covid-19 memes). Many of these visual materials have been overlooked by art and medical historians, by humour scholars, or by both, and this volume underscores their importance as evocative and informative cultural artefacts. By taking the humour and the social significance of this visual culture seriously, the authors in this volume grapple with slippery topics and intersections — namely illness, addiction, disability, death, gender, class, race and sex — in novel ways. The volume joins a growing body of work that entangles the visual with medical and health humanities research, showcasing how visual humour can further our understandings of health and the human experience.Offering thoughtful and colourful analysis, Sick jokes shows how visual humour works to both illuminate and distort the realities of health, ill health and the medical world. This volume examines the role that visual humour has played and continues to play in contexts of health, medicine and the body. Throughout the modern era, artists, critics, patients and healthcare professionals have visualised medical jokes, or depicted medicalised bodies or scenes, in humorous or satirical ways. These materials do practical and emotional work for varied stakeholders, turning fears and uncertainties around the body and medicine into digestible, and fully visible, jokes. Looking at sources from Europe and the United States where art, medicine and comedy collide, this volume shows how visual culture offers a particularly embodied - and yet oftentimes comfortably removed - perspective on everyday and exceptional experiences of health, illness and the body. The visual humour analysed in this volume provides a critical and colourful account of bodily representation, medical treatments, public health communications, injury, addiction, disfigurement, disease, disability, sex and death.