Alisha Rankin: Picturing Expertise: Eye Surgeons, Images, and Innovation in Early Modern Germany

In 1583, a surgeon from Dresden named Georg Bartisch published the first substantial book on eye care. The book contained over 80 woodcuts, which depicted ailments of the eye and how to treat them with both surgical and non-surgical remedies. It became a best-seller, read by surgeons and physicians alike, and it helped secure Bartisch a paid position as court oculist to Elector August I of Saxony, the first position of its kind. The book also had an afterlife in two anonymous seventeenth-century manuscripts, copied from the original work but re-illustrated with hand-drawn and updated images. This talk examines how the images in these texts made arguments about the surgeon’s expertise and authority. It argues that Bartisch used his images to expand his professional profile, while later surgeons used innovations in the images to make an argument for their own expertise. While images of tools and bandages had long been associated with surgeons, these works included a wider range of that reinforced surgeons’ arguments about the expansiveness of their practice.

Alisha Rankin is Professor and Chair of History at Tufts University and a co-editor of the Bulletin of the History of Medicine. Her work focuses on the history of medicine and science in early modern Europe, with a particular focus on questions of experiment, expertise and authority and on the use and circulation of materia medica. She is the author of two award-winning books, Panaceia's Daughters: Noblewomen as Healers in Early Modern Europe (Chicago, 2013) and The Poison Trials: Wonder Drugs, Experiment, and the Battle for Authority in Renaissance Science (Chicago, 2021), alongside two edited collections and multiple articles. Currently she is co-editing the early modern volume of the Cambridge History of Medicine and working on projects on surgical illustration and on patient testimonials.