Picturing Health and Illness: Images of Identity and Difference

Ours is a culture riddled with preoccupations about health and disease. In this timely study Sander Gilman demonstrates how images of beauty and ugliness have constructed a visual history which records the artificial boundaries that continue to divide 'healthy' bodies from ones that are ill. He shows how cultural fantasies of health and illness have come to be identified and defined by means of visual, aesthetic criteria - for the healthy is now seen as beautiful and the ill as ugly.