Anyone who has opened an old medical missionary journal has seen them: page after page of blurry black-and-white photographs, each showing Chinese people suffering from horrifying, body-desecrating afflictions—elephantiasis, leprosy, massive tumors. The overall effect of these photographs is to produce, at least for the habitual reader of medical journals, a sense that China was not only a spectacularly diseased place, but also a place so abject that disease could easily be turned into a spectacle for the Western eye.
In her pioneering new study, Larissa N. Heinrich suggests that the impact of these images went far beyond medical circles. The central contention of The Afterlife of Images is that medical illustrations were key artifacts that helped shape China's identity as the “Sick Man of Asia” in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Furthermore, Heinrich argues that medical images were crucial in informing Chinese conceptions of their own identity in an age of Western imperialism.
In tracing this deleterious “afterlife of images,” Heinrich does not limit herself to the easy target of colonial-era medical photography. Instead, she considers a broad range of images, including Chinese woodblock illustrations, oil paintings, anatomical atlases, and lantern slides of microbes. Heinrich's analytical approach is equally wide ranging, drawing from a variety of disciplines, including history, cultural studies, art history, and literary studies. As a result, the work shifts among discussions of social context, technological production, mass consumption, provenance, and literary influence, combined with the author's own readings of the images themselves. This eclectic approach may disappoint some who are looking for more concrete connections between images and society, and, certainly, the images themselves may inspire differing interpretations. Nevertheless, because of this eclectic approach, scholars from different fields within China studies will be able to find inspiration throughout the book.
The first chapter is a meditation on the origin and circulation of the idea of China as the “Cradle of Smallpox,” although in this chapter, images are less important than text and context. Beginning with woodblock illustrations of smallpox “types” from the eighteenth-century classic Yizong jinjian, Heinrich demonstrates how the French Jesuit Martial Cibot first lifted—then twisted—medical knowledge from Chinese smallpox texts. The irascible father's theory on the deep antiquity of smallpox in China was then received in the midst of Europe's contentious debate over inoculation, unwittingly reproduced in numerous histories over the next century, and ultimately picked up in the 1930s by K. Chimin Wong and Wu Lien-teh in their definitive History of Chinese Medicine: Being a Chronicle of Medical Happenings in China from Ancient Times to the Present Period (2nd ed., Shanghai: National Quarantine Service, 1936). Thus, a European's pronouncement on the diseased nature of China became, almost 200 years later, accepted as fact by Chinese chroniclers.
After three chapters of similar colonial genealogies, Heinrich is ready to show the ultimate influence of medical images—on the father of modern Chinese literature, Lu Xun. Steeped in an education that included anatomical atlases such as Benjamin Hobson's 1851 work Quanti xinlun, Lu Xun could imagine the human body—and reality in general—peeled back and exposed, made up of discrete parts laid bare to analyze with a cold dissector's eye. Scholars have spent years searching for the famous “Chinese execution slide” that was shown at the end of one of Lu Xun's medical school classes, an image so powerful that it inspired Lu Xun's conversion from medicine to literature. Heinrich accurately suggests that in order to understand Lu Xun's approach to literature, scholars would be better off analyzing the more banal images of tissues and microbes that preceded the famous decapitation image.
When considering the reception of medical images by Western audiences (and Chinese writers), Heinrich's conclusions are convincing. The picture gets more complicated, however, when Chinese themselves are the producers of “sick Chinese” images. The portraits of tumor patients painted by the nineteenth-century Cantonese artist Lam Qua are a case in point. Is the Chinese artist mouthing, in oils, the message of the “deficient Chinese character” held by his collaborator, the American medical missionary Peter Parker? Or does Lam Qua see (and thus compel us to see) his Chinese subjects with a different, independent eye? Heinrich suggests that the Chinese in Lam Qua's paintings are portrayed as victims of their deficient culture, indifferent to pain and suffering. However, while some may gaze upon a face and see primitive indifference, others may see unmistakable signs of serenity and human dignity. Allowing more agency for the painter would have allowed different readings of the paintings. This, in turn, may have created awkward chinks in the monolithic imperialist “Sick Man of Asia” construct. As the complex analysis of Lu Xun's literary imagination demonstrates, the book is actually strongest when it sets aside pursuit of the “Sick Man” project.
Recently, scholars such as Craig Clunas and Vivienne Lo have begun to focus on different regimes of visuality in late imperial China. Heinrich's work brings these concerns to the post–Opium War world. After The Afterlife of Images, scholars of modern Chinese history will be compelled to look upon medical images with fresh eyes, and from a multitude of angles.
