How western society came to see China as an inherently unhealthy place, and how that notion came to be incorporated into Chinese national identity

In 1739 China’s emperor authorized the publication of a medical text that included images of children with smallpox to aid in the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. Those images made their way to Europe, where they were interpreted as indicative of the ill health and medical backwardness of the Chinese. In the mid-nineteenth century, the celebrated Cantonese painter Lam Qua collaborated with the American medical missionary Peter Parker in the creation of portraits of Chinese patients with disfiguring pathologies, rendered both before and after surgery. Europeans saw those portraits as evidence of Western medical prowess. Within China, the visual idiom that the paintings established influenced the development of medical photography. In The Afterlife of Images, Ari Larissa Heinrich investigates the creation and circulation of Western medical discourses that linked ideas about disease to Chinese identity beginning in the eighteenth century.

Combining literary studies, the history of science, and visual culture studies, Heinrich analyzes the rhetoric and iconography through which medical missionaries transmitted to the West an image of China as “sick” or “diseased.” He also examines the absorption of that image back into China through missionary activity, through the earliest translations of Western medical texts into Chinese, and even through the literature of Chinese nationalism. Heinrich argues that over time “scientific” Western representations of the Chinese body and culture accumulated a host of secondary meanings, taking on an afterlife with lasting consequences for conceptions of Chinese identity in China and beyond its borders.

"“The Afterlife of Images opens a new window through which scholars and students can see and debate how Western medicine and science participated in shaping modern Chinese conceptions of the body, the self, and the nation, as well as the Chinese imagination of modernity.”" - China Review International

"“Heinrich's book is an important addition to a growing interest in medical images in China. . . . Heinrich's work shows that the cultural importance of such images and their history transcends the boundary of clinical medical practice and helped shape the very nature of expression in China in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”" - Visual Resources

"“In The Afterlife of Images, Larissa Heinrich not only achieves the difficult task of incorporating the epistemological significance of ‘ocular evidence’ into her historical analysis (p. 4), but she also addresses the cross-cultural dynamics in the history of conceptions of pathology between China and the West.”" - Social History of Medicine

"“This book is exemplary for doing what very few works of scholarship on Chinese history have done—privileging visual sources over textual ones. . . . [T]he effect of the book is remarkable, and The Afterlife of Images achieves its larger goals of pushing analysis of images to the forefront of the historical agenda, challenging us to look beyond written sources for the origins of the
discourse of China’s pathology.”" - China Perspectives

"“This is such a beautifully written, easy to understand, excellent book; I think Heinrich’s unwillingness to be bounded by the parochial limits of disciplines is a huge factor in the strength and success of her arguments. . . . Heinrich also makes clear through implication how easily the supposedly rational and objective discourses of science and medicine are repurposed and deployed for tendentious, politicized, even imperialistic purposes; in some ways the imposition of modern science and medicine on China, more or less with the threat of military force implicit in its background, mirrors the imposition at gunpoint of the supposedly universal and transcendent of international law discussed by James Hevia and Lydia Liu: chilling. If the topic sounds at all interesting to you, I can't recommend this book enough.”" - Cognitive Resonance blog

"“Very well illustrated, this work demonstrates how valuable the study of images and photographs is for rethinking modern Chinese history and literary change.”" - International History Review