In Disease and Representation, cultural historian Sander L. Gilman investigates how Western medicine, literature and visual culture have constructed images of the diseased body, and how those images have shaped the treatment and understanding of people living with illness.

Richly illustrated with historical engravings, psychiatric photographs, paintings and medical imagery, the book considers figures including Charles Dickens, E. T. A. Hoffmann, Vincent van Gogh and Heinrich von Kleist. It moves through from eighteenth-century representations of madness and the asylum, by way of sexuality, psychiatric diagnosis and then onwards to the cultural anxieties surrounding AIDS, asking how cultural assumptions about deviance, sexuality and normality become embedded in the act of representation itself. An important interdisciplinary study for readers interested in the history of medicine, visual culture, psychiatry, the body and the politics of scientific knowledge.

Cornell University Press, 1994 third printing of the 1988 paperback edition. Good condition, with noticeable creasing, rubbing and surface wear to covers. Illustrated throughout; interior pages appear clean and well preserved.