In the early 1880s, the book Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt brought to the American and British marketplace the most comprehensive visual survey of the Holy Land that had yet appeared. It came at a time when Protestant Christians in both countries felt the need was “urgent” for “accurate” illustrations of these regions that could serve to explain and “defend” the Scriptures against science and the new biblical criticism. To obtain such images, the publishing firms of D. Appleton in New York City and James S. Virtue in London sent the artists John Douglas Woodward and Harry Fenn on extended sketching trips in 1878 and 1879. Published serially from 1881 to 1883, Picturesque Palestine's nine hundred pages and six hundred black-and-white images would constitute the most conspicuous response to the contemporary appeals for illustrations of the Holy Land (Figure 1).At the same time, it would present these Eastern Mediterranean regions so significant to the history of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam through the lens of the picturesque — employing familiar aesthetic conventions long popular in British and American view books. In this approach, the artist or traveler searches for elements in the landscape that conform to preset ideas of what constitutes a picture — in this case, those distinguished by pleasing variety, irregularity of form, rough texture, and contrasts of light and dark. Thus, the book is a prime, and quite late, example of the “visualisation of the travel experience,” in which scenic tourism replaced the opportunity to meet and converse with others as the primary appeal of travel. Its comprehensive visual survey is also akin to the displays at the world's fairs so popular in this period that presented various regions and peoples as spectacle or theater.
EARLY HISTORY OF EXTRAPLEURAL THORACOPLASTY FOR PULMONARY TUBERCULOSIS IN NEW YORK CITY