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Accepted Paper:

Therapeutic iconography: Visual imagery in a marginal medical tradition  
Helen Lambert (University of Bristol)

Paper short abstract:

This paper analyses the medical iconography used by north Indian ‘bone doctors’ (haad vaidya) to represent and advertise their work.

Paper long abstract:

This paper analyses the medical iconography used by north Indian 'bone doctors' (haad vaidya) to represent and advertise their work. Drawing on a study of 30 practices in urban Rajasthan, I examine the iconography of bonesetting as displayed in the public advertisements and business cards used by practitioners, as well as the visual displays and material spaces of their treatment settings. Prevalent 'traditional' iconography links bone doctoring with wrestling prowess and an indexical relation between visual image and therapeutic form is premised on the assumption of an illiterate clientele. Other representational displays employ visual imagery associated with particular biomedical technologies of the body to establish the contemporaneity of practices that do not, in fact, employ such technologies. The aesthetics of clinical spaces are undergoing similar reconfiguration to achieve a more identifiably 'sanitary' appeal. The paper seeks to situate exploration of practices that are marginal to the formal health system in an emerging gap between indexical and symbolic aspects of therapeutic imagery associated with bone doctoring.

Panel P31
Healing arts? The arts and aesthetics of medical display
  Session 1