Reduced Complexity or Essentialism? Medical Knowledge and “Reading Traces” in the History of Art

Chapters in this book

1. Frontmatter 1
2. Inhalt 5
3. Editorial 7
4. Image Description
5. Layers of Operation. Lars Leksell’s Neurosurgical Planning Image 11
6. Description, Experiment, and Model. Reading Traces in Paleobiological Research Exemplified by a Morpho-functional Analysis 15
7. Image Description
8. Visualizing Viruses. Notes on David S. Goodsell’s Scientific Illustrations and Their Use in Molecular Biology between Picture Model and Trace 29
9. Microscopic Imaging. Interference, Intervention, Objectivity 35
10. “It is not enough, in order to understand the Book of Nature, to turn over the pages looking at the pictures. Painful though it may be, it will be necessary to learn to read the text.” Visual Evidence in the Life Sciences, c. 1960 55
11. Giving a Theory a Material Body. Staining Technique and the “Autarchy of the Nucleus” since 1876 65
12. Interview
13. Traces and Patterns. Pictures of Interferences and Collisions in the Physics Lab A Dialogue between Dr. Anne Dippel and Dr. Lukas Mairhofer 75
14. Liquid or Globular? On the History of Gestalt-seeing in the Life Sciences of the Early 19th Century 89
15. Traces of Bodies and Operational Portraits. On the Construction of Pictorial Evidence 99
16. Reduced Complexity or Essentialism? Medical Knowledge and “Reading Traces” in the History of Art 111
17. Image Credits 121
18. Authors 123