Picturing Knowledge: Historical and Philosophical Problems Concerning the Use of Art in Science, and: Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality (review)

“I’m supposed to understand this now, just by looking at it?” My friend’s expostulation—provoked by her son’s insistence on explaining atomic structure to her from a textbook diagram—highlights a major point of both of these books: the meaning of scientific and medical illustrations is not self-evident. The seventeenth-century Chinese artist who was asked by Jesuit missionaries to copy Ramelli’s 1588 engraving of a windlass might have sympathized with my friend. Bert S. Hall, in Brian Baigrie’s Picturing Knowledge, discusses this case, originally raised by Samuel Y. Edgerton Jr. in 1985 and 1991. To the novice, the illustration means little on its own. There is no way to judge the significance of the lines, shapes, shading, white space, proportions, borders—let alone the point of the picture as a whole—without an acquaintance with the technical, visual, and cultural contexts of the illustration.

But it is equally true, Karen Newman and the Baigrie contributors argue, that the full meaning of an illustrated work in science, technology, or medicine cannot be understood from the words alone. Not only can the pictures convey information more compactly than text can, but pictures can also serve as vehicles of persuasion. Fetal Positions does an admirable, succinct job of explicating (from a frankly feminist and pro-choice point of view) the emotional and political implications of portrayals of pregnant women, wombs, and fetuses in anatomical atlases and models, obstetrical/gynecological textbooks, popular science, religious art, and antiabortion picket signs. Newman demonstrates how, through a variety of pictorial conventions, the fetus is persistently represented as an independent, autonomous individual, visually separate from the pregnant woman, who is often omitted from the picture altogether. The absence of the woman may have contributed to the mistake of printing the medieval drawing in figure 16 upside down (personal communication, Diane Voss).

Readers of Picturing Knowledge should start with Brian Baigrie’s sensible introduction and then turn to David Topper’s essay, “Towards an Epistemology of Scientific Illustration.” In this bridge between the book’s historical studies and its more philosophically oriented essays, Topper lists the issues of importance in scientific illustrations, at least in the Western tradition. Bert Hall, Martin Kemp, Baigrie, David Knight, Robert J. O’Hara, Stephanie Moser, Ronald Giere, and Michael Ruse amplify these points in their meaty case studies of Renaissance natural history, anatomy, technology, and cosmology, Descartes’s use of diagrams and mechanical models, the range of illustrations in chemistry, the charts of the “natural systems” proposed for classifying birds (the only reprinted essay), and archaeologists’ depictions of “ape-men.” The contributors show the persuasive power of illustrations and metaphors in the debates over continental drift in geology and adaptive landscapes in population genetics. Using a wide range of examples from mathematics and the physical sciences, James Robert Brown discusses the ways visual images express, or trigger, scientists’ inferences of phenomena from data.

Topper’s list and the case studies tend to focus on the purpose and reception of the finished illustration. But how does the picture come into being? How does the scientist decide what needs to be depicted, what style to use, and what models to copy or adapt? How does the intended audience influence the form of the illustrations? How and when does the scientist work with the artist and the printer? What problems of visual representation must be solved? How, for example, can the illustrator of an obstetrical manual portray the fetus clearly without somehow downplaying the visual presence of the woman who completely surrounds the fetus? Newman sidesteps the artist’s dilemma.

And what does the scientist learn through the collaborative creation of...