The Corner Society- Something Useful in a National Sense: Percy Hennell's Plastic Surgery Photography as Propaganda

Image Credit: Percy Hennell, The Hands of Sir Harold Gillies, c. 1940-1957, color photograph, Archive of the British Association of Plastic, Reconstructive, and Aesthetic Surgeons, London, BAPRAS/HEN/11/5.

Christine Slobogin,  Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester

Something Useful in a National Sense: Percy Hennell's Plastic Surgery Photography as Propaganda.

This talk examines the role of imagery in medical mythmaking, particularly through work done by photographer Percy Hennell (1911-1987) in Britain during the 1940s. Hennell is best known for his color images of Second World War reconstructive surgery, but he also illustrated the books British Women Go to War (1943) and An English Farmhouse and Its Neighbourhood (1948). Seemingly disparate, these three groups of 1940s photographs are united by visual devices that showcase British nationalisms and anxieties - in both medicine and in wider society. Comparing these bodies of work provides a better understanding of the role of visual propaganda in defining British plastic surgery. 

Christine Slobogin is an Assistant Professor of Health Humanities and Bioethics at the University of Rochester. She is an art historian and health humanities scholar who uses visual culture as a way to understand ethics, emotion, medicine, and gender in history. She is working on a book titled Plastic Surgery on Paper: How Visual Culture Defined Second World War Reconstructive Surgery in Britain.