Sick Jokes: Visual Histories of Humour, Health and the Body

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.