THE HEALING ARTS
The Healing Arts: Sickness and Social Impact explores aspects of health, illness, and healing, with nineteen prints, photographs, and watercolors from the Ackland's collection. In order to suggest some of the varied ways of thinking about these topics, the art in the exhibition comes from eight countries in four continents - Europe, North and South America, and Asia - spans the last five centuries, and presents different points of view. Works of art by Albrecht Dürer, William Blake, Francisco Goya, Honoré Daumier, Lewis Hine, Sebastião Salgado, Richard Avedon and others address the exhibition's principal themes: representations of diseases, attitudes toward Western medicine, alternative approaches to healing, and the effect of the environment on health and illness. These themes correspond to some of the issues important to "The Art of Healing, The Science of Curing," Professor Kaja Finkler's first-year seminar in the UNC-Chapel Hill Department of Anthropology. Professor Finkler, who is a medical anthropologist, assisted the Ackland's University Educator Carolyn Allmendinger in curating this exhibition so that it could support her students' work during the fall semester.
The exhibition's themes intersect with one another; Daumier's An Omnibus During Flu Season not only represents the chills and coughing of people suffering from the flu, but also suggests the impact of the environment on public health. In the urban setting of nineteenth century Paris, crowded buses brought sick people in close contact with each other. Dürer's Melencolia I presents depression, or melancholy, as a condition associated with scholars and study, in keeping with medieval theories of the four bodily humors and their effect on health and temperament. For twenty-first century viewers, it suggests both the characteristics of an illness and cultural attitudes that shaped the experience of those who had the illness. Avedon's Evening Prayers on the West Bank of the Ganges also engages with two of the exhibition's themes. The scene highlights the spiritual significance of the river, which is considered to have healing properties for those who bathe in it. Seen from another perspective, however, the pollution in the Ganges raises issues of environmental impact on health.
The organization of the exhibition highlights the comparative method as a valuable tool for discerning the complexities of the issues - for anthropologists, art historians, and practitioners of other disciplines too. Two or more perspectives on, for example, the role of religious belief in healing can help to deepen understanding of the issues and formulate questions for further study. A copy of Finkler's course syllabus and reading list are available in the gallery for visitors interested in learning more about her teaching. And on Friday, November 9, the Ackland will host a gallery talk on The Healing Arts from 6:45 PM - 7:15 PM.
Auguste Raffet, French (1804-1860): Barbarism and Cholera Enter Europe, from La Caricature, 1831; lithograph. The William A. Whitaker Foundation Art Fund.