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The atrocity exhibition redux
DISSECTING ROOM
Books The atrocity exhibition redux Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003. Pp 117. £12.99. ISBN 0 241 14207 5.
or many people the impulse to regard the pain of others often comes from photographs of war and trauma on the television. Unlike doctors, who confront suffering in the raw every day, there is the distancing effect of the frame and the small screen. But do we have a surfeit of these distressing visions and do they harm us? Susan Sontag’s latest book is a reappraisal of her ideas on these problems expressed in On Photography (1977). In this earlier work she was concerned that we may become habituated to horror and suggested that perhaps “images of carnage be cut back”. In her new book, she now admits that this will never happen. One can ration horrific imagery by simply turning off the television set, but most will continue to watch. Sontag senses that the late 1970s fear that guerrilla war struggles would become the new entertainment was an exaggeration; it is
F
likely that many viewers in 2003 prefer The Simpsons to 24-hour news coverage. Her revised defence of hellish images from such places as Sarajevo and the middle east is robust, that it is “good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others”. In the west, Sontag reminds us that we are “citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk”. The distant pain of the middle east conflict seems to cause less distress than, say, the calamity of Sept 11, 2001. Violent images retain power, but as Sontag points out “compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action or it withers.” She is acutely alert to “issues of exploitation of sentiment (pity, compassion, indignation)” and “humbug in photographers of conscience”. Sontag pertinently points out how facial wounds are often censored by media networks and that “perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this
extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons . . . the rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be”. Sontag feels that “it is intolerable to have one’s sufferings twinned with anybody else’s”. This is true, but fear may well be one of man’s best friends because by perceiving fear we can all take another course of action, we can prevent pain and this may prevent horror. Sontag depressingly concludes when looking at pictures of those who have died in a combat zone that “We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like.” But this position is applicable universally, and recalls Duchamp’s epitaph—“anyway, it’s always other people who die”. One day we will all find out, but not yet please . . . not yet. Author of the seminal text Illness as Metaphor, Sontag maintains in this new, albeit lugubrious, work her status as required reading for those in medicine. John Quin e-mail: [email protected]
Exhibition Dr Johnson and friends here are perhaps very few conditions more to be pitied than that of an active and elevated mind, labouring under the weight of a distempered body.” Of Samuel Johnson’s anonymous, but often autobiographical, essays in the 18thcentury publication The Rambler, his thoughts on health are perhaps the most poignant. Scrofula, an infection of the lymph glands, which Johnson contracted in childhood, was to mark the beginning of a life plagued by disease. By the time he died in 1784, he had suffered from bronchial disease, asthma, and gout, and a host of lesser ailments such as poor eyesight and hearing. As well as these physical weaknesses, he was prone to extreme melancholy and depression. Johnson did not endure his ailments alone, however; an exhibition in the garret where the lexicographer compiled the first dictionary looks at the troubled health of Johnson and five of his close friends.
T
The Tyranny of Treatment: Samuel Johnson, his Friends, and Georgian Medicine An exhibition at Dr Johnson’s House, London, UK, until Jan 31, 2004. A collection of essays to accompany the exhibition is published by The British Art Journal.
2126
The exhibition includes Fanny Burney’s account of her mastectomy in Paris. Done before the invention of anaesthesia, the surgery involved alternately cutting and cauterising the wound to minimise blood loss. Many of Johnson’s friends were compulsive diarists, keen to record their thoughts and experiences for posterity. Burney was no exception. She recorded her operation in great detail: “When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast—cutting through veins, arteries, flesh, nerves—I need no injunctions not to restrain my cries . . . so excruciating was the agony.” Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, seemed to have had two great passions: alcohol and women. London provided him with plenty of both. Frequently, one indulgence led to the other, leaving Boswell racked by guilt and selfloathing. Despite owning an animal gut prophylaxis, an example of which is on display in the exhibition, he had contracted gonorrhoea 19 times before he died, aged 54 years, probably of complications from persistent venereal disease and alcoholism. Also on display are several 18thcentury surgical instruments on loan from the Royal College of Surgeons, such as a cautery iron, bleeding lancets,
Rights were not granted to include this image in electronic media. Please refer to the printed journal.
Museum of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britian
“
By Rev John Sneyd, etched by James Gillray
and an ivory ear trumpet. Extracts from textbooks containing detailed diagrams and descriptions of surgical technique provide a context for these instruments.
THE LANCET • Vol 362 • December 20/27, 2003 • www.thelancet.com
For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet.
Books The atrocity exhibition redux Regarding the Pain of Others Susan Sontag. London: Hamish Hamilton, 2003. Pp 117. £12.99. ISBN 0 241 14207 5.
or many people the impulse to regard the pain of others often comes from photographs of war and trauma on the television. Unlike doctors, who confront suffering in the raw every day, there is the distancing effect of the frame and the small screen. But do we have a surfeit of these distressing visions and do they harm us? Susan Sontag’s latest book is a reappraisal of her ideas on these problems expressed in On Photography (1977). In this earlier work she was concerned that we may become habituated to horror and suggested that perhaps “images of carnage be cut back”. In her new book, she now admits that this will never happen. One can ration horrific imagery by simply turning off the television set, but most will continue to watch. Sontag senses that the late 1970s fear that guerrilla war struggles would become the new entertainment was an exaggeration; it is
F
likely that many viewers in 2003 prefer The Simpsons to 24-hour news coverage. Her revised defence of hellish images from such places as Sarajevo and the middle east is robust, that it is “good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense of how much suffering caused by human wickedness there is in the world we share with others”. In the west, Sontag reminds us that we are “citizens of modernity, consumers of violence as spectacle, adepts of proximity without risk”. The distant pain of the middle east conflict seems to cause less distress than, say, the calamity of Sept 11, 2001. Violent images retain power, but as Sontag points out “compassion is an unstable emotion. It needs to be translated into action or it withers.” She is acutely alert to “issues of exploitation of sentiment (pity, compassion, indignation)” and “humbug in photographers of conscience”. Sontag pertinently points out how facial wounds are often censored by media networks and that “perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this
extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons . . . the rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be”. Sontag feels that “it is intolerable to have one’s sufferings twinned with anybody else’s”. This is true, but fear may well be one of man’s best friends because by perceiving fear we can all take another course of action, we can prevent pain and this may prevent horror. Sontag depressingly concludes when looking at pictures of those who have died in a combat zone that “We don’t get it. We truly can’t imagine what it was like.” But this position is applicable universally, and recalls Duchamp’s epitaph—“anyway, it’s always other people who die”. One day we will all find out, but not yet please . . . not yet. Author of the seminal text Illness as Metaphor, Sontag maintains in this new, albeit lugubrious, work her status as required reading for those in medicine. John Quin e-mail: [email protected]
Exhibition Dr Johnson and friends here are perhaps very few conditions more to be pitied than that of an active and elevated mind, labouring under the weight of a distempered body.” Of Samuel Johnson’s anonymous, but often autobiographical, essays in the 18thcentury publication The Rambler, his thoughts on health are perhaps the most poignant. Scrofula, an infection of the lymph glands, which Johnson contracted in childhood, was to mark the beginning of a life plagued by disease. By the time he died in 1784, he had suffered from bronchial disease, asthma, and gout, and a host of lesser ailments such as poor eyesight and hearing. As well as these physical weaknesses, he was prone to extreme melancholy and depression. Johnson did not endure his ailments alone, however; an exhibition in the garret where the lexicographer compiled the first dictionary looks at the troubled health of Johnson and five of his close friends.
T
The Tyranny of Treatment: Samuel Johnson, his Friends, and Georgian Medicine An exhibition at Dr Johnson’s House, London, UK, until Jan 31, 2004. A collection of essays to accompany the exhibition is published by The British Art Journal.
2126
The exhibition includes Fanny Burney’s account of her mastectomy in Paris. Done before the invention of anaesthesia, the surgery involved alternately cutting and cauterising the wound to minimise blood loss. Many of Johnson’s friends were compulsive diarists, keen to record their thoughts and experiences for posterity. Burney was no exception. She recorded her operation in great detail: “When the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast—cutting through veins, arteries, flesh, nerves—I need no injunctions not to restrain my cries . . . so excruciating was the agony.” Johnson’s biographer, James Boswell, seemed to have had two great passions: alcohol and women. London provided him with plenty of both. Frequently, one indulgence led to the other, leaving Boswell racked by guilt and selfloathing. Despite owning an animal gut prophylaxis, an example of which is on display in the exhibition, he had contracted gonorrhoea 19 times before he died, aged 54 years, probably of complications from persistent venereal disease and alcoholism. Also on display are several 18thcentury surgical instruments on loan from the Royal College of Surgeons, such as a cautery iron, bleeding lancets,
Rights were not granted to include this image in electronic media. Please refer to the printed journal.
Museum of the Royal Pharmaceutical Society of Great Britian
“
By Rev John Sneyd, etched by James Gillray
and an ivory ear trumpet. Extracts from textbooks containing detailed diagrams and descriptions of surgical technique provide a context for these instruments.
THE LANCET • Vol 362 • December 20/27, 2003 • www.thelancet.com
For personal use. Only reproduce with permission from The Lancet.