Body Modern

Michael Sappol is fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study in Uppsala. He is the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America and Dream Anatomy, and the editor of A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of Empire and Hidden Treasure: The National Library of Medicine.

• ContentsPrefaceIntroduction: Fritz Kahn, Modernity, and the Invention of Conceptual Scientific Illustration1. Reading Kahn and the Homunculus2. “Much Better than Words”: Pictured Knowledge and the Rhetoric of Visuality3. Ocularcentric! Conceptual Illustration at Work in the “Great Loop”4. Variety Show: The Studio of Kahn and Its Visual Devices5. Kahn’s Way-Out: Conceptual Illustration’s Iconophilic Diaspora6. “To Picture the Body”: Kahn’s Images in the Postmodern AfterlifeEpilogue: Towards a Theory of the HomunculusAcknowledgmentsFritz Kahn: A ChronologyNotesIndex

"The chance meeting of Popular Mechanics and Gray’s Anatomy on a dissecting table, Fritz Kahn’s cutaway views of our inner workings expose far more than blood, guts, and bones. Taking Kahn’s delirious illustrations as his jumping-off point, Michael Sappol uses his vast historical erudition, just enough theory, and a prose style that cuts like a knife to lay bare the visual unconscious of the Machine Age. Delving deeper, he discovers the self, a cognitive widget turned out by Modernism’s philosophical assembly line. Witty, incisive, and impeccably researched, Body Modern is an X-ray of our image world in its early years, before the deluge."-Mark Dery, author of I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-By Essays on American Dread, American Dreams"The book is nicely illustrated and the history of our relationship between biology and mythology is brilliantly addressed."-The Daily Heller"Densely academic, yet provocative enough for a lay person to extract some meaning."-Santa Fe New Mexican"The merits of Michael Sappol’s study are numerous. Sappol gives a first-rate overview of the key themes and forms of Kahn’s editorial achievements as well as the manifold ways it was appropriated in other countries and cultures."-Leonardo Reviews"The author’s lucid commentaries provide excellent guidance through the forest of Kahn’s topics, ranging from anatomy to architecture, and from physiology to thermodynamics." -Bulletin of the History of Medicine"An intellectually important book that is delightfully well written." -ISIS