Collecting affect: emotion and empathy in World War II photographs and drawings of plastic surgery

2021 ◽  
pp. medhum-2020-012108
Author(s):  
Christine Slobogin
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Plastic Surgery ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Operating Theatre ◽  
World War ◽  
Historical Empathy ◽  
Compositional Choices

This article compares drawings by Diana ‘Dickie’ Orpen (1914–2008) with photographs by Percy Hennell (1911–1987); both of their oeuvres depict plastic reconstructive surgeries from World War II in Britain. Through visual analysis, personal experience and interviews with archivists who have worked with the collections, this article aims to determine the affective effects of these drawings and photographs. I argue that Hennell’s images are the more affective and subjective objects, even though their original purpose was objective and scientific. This article asks why Hennell’s photographs of plastic surgery produce such a vehement emotive response.Investigating Hennell’s use of colour, his compositional choices and the unexpected visual particulars of the operating theatre that he captures—all of which ‘collect affect’ within the photo-archival object—this analysis uses a phenomenological framework to determine the limitations and strengths of two very different styles and mediums of World War II surgical imagery.Beyond establishing which group of images is more affecting, this article also shows why it is empathy that is the most fitting emotional description of the typical responses to Hennell’s photographs. This type of visual analysis of empathic images can be applied to objects-based medical humanities pedagogy that encourages empathy—historical empathy as well as empathy in the present day—for surgical practitioners and trainees.

Madeleine Dring

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Wanda Brister ◽  
Jay Rosenblatt
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Royal College ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Art Songs ◽  
Early Years ◽  
Full Time ◽  
World War ◽  
Musical Style ◽  
Piano Students ◽  
Television Shows

This book is the first scholarly biography of Madeleine Dring (1923–1977). Using diaries, letters, and extensive archival research, the narrative examines her career and explores her music. The story of Dring’s life begins with her formal training at the Royal College of Music, first in the Junior Department and then as a full-time student, a period that also covers her personal experience of events both leading up to and during the early years of World War II. Her career is traced in detail through radio and television shows and West End revues, all productions for which she wrote music, as well as her work as an actor. Dring’s most important contemporaries are briefly discussed in relation to her life, including her teachers at the Royal College of Music, professional connections such as Felicity Gray and Laurier Lister, and her husband Roger Lord. Her musical compositions are surveyed, from the earliest works she wrote as a student to the art songs she wrote in her last years, along with various popular numbers for revues and numerous piano pieces for beginning piano students as well as those suitable for the concert hall. Each chapter singles out one or more of these works for detailed description and analysis, with attention to the qualities that characterize her distinctive musical style.

PLASTIC SURGERY IN WORLD WAR I AND IN WORLD WAR II

1946 ◽  
Vol 123 (4) ◽  
pp. 610-621 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Staige Davis
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Plastic Surgery ◽  
World War

scholarly journals The Path Forward

2017 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon Sund
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Political System ◽  
School Desegregation ◽  
Corporate America ◽  
Next Generation ◽  
World War ◽  
Good People ◽  
The U.S

Abstract We in America all care about our democracy and want the best possible outcome for our nation. But how do we get there? What is your role and mine? Can we really make a difference? The American political system is facilitating the election of candidates whom citizens feel do not represent them. My personal experience living in Germany as the country was rebuilding after World War II, then living in Mississippi during school desegregation, and later in corporate America, and finally as a candidate for the U.S. Congress, showed me that good people can wait too long to act. This article is written to save people from regretting that they didn’t do something when they had a chance. I show ways to advance ideals to help create a world we are happy to leave to the next generation. This article will empower readers to take action.

scholarly journals Seeing the Bigger Picture: Conspiratorial Revisions of World War II History in Recent Russian Cinema

Slavic Review ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (2) ◽  
pp. 441-464
Author(s):  
Boris Noordenbos
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Visual Analysis ◽  
Conspiracy Theory ◽  
Television Series ◽  
World War ◽  
Feature Film ◽  
The Past ◽  
Intelligence Services ◽  
Russian Cinema

This article analyzes revisions of World War II history in recent Russian cinema and television, including the feature filmThe Match(Andrei Maliukov, 2012),Spy (Aleksei Andrianov, 2012), and the television seriesLiquidation(Sergei Ursuliak, 2007). All these productions rely on the logic of conspiracy theory for their reimaginations of war history: pivotal developments during the war or its aftermath are presented as the result of subterranean manipulations by enemies or intelligence services. Through a narrative and visual analysis, the article shows how these films and series use the notion of conspiracy to reformat the contexts of wartime events and to place them within a speculative “bigger picture.” In doing so, they infer that what we know about the past is merely a part or effect of larger, hidden designs. Finally, the article situates these findings within a wider “reconciliation with the Soviet” in Putin-era culture, which increasingly centers on the remembrance of World War II.

Zero Hour in Arno Schmidt's Triptych Leviathan; or, An Adventure Allegorist at the Crossroads

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Claudia Franken
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
World War ◽  
Rhetorical Devices ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
Modern Physics ◽  
Long Term Consequences ◽  
Academic Demands

Arno Schmidt’s tripartite Leviathan (1949; written 1946—1948) is one of the few German narratives composed immediately after World War II. Different from the then newly-propagated Trümmerliteratur (literature among the ruins) or the literature of Vergangenheitsbewältigung (coping with the past), Schmidt’s writing condensed and “dehydrated” narrative events, weaving antiquity and his personal experience into one in order to lay bare historical lines of continuity. Relating to Pytheas of Marsilia, to an ethics based on praxis and to modern physics, he undertakes a demanding topography of “hell descents” within which he also put into doubt political and academic demands upon a cultural legacy that was, to him, anything but timeless. The essay explores Schmidt’s didactic, innovative use of allegory and other rhetorical devices as tools for understanding long-term consequences of failures of interpretation and forceful restrictions on the play of imagination.

Physics in a university laboratory before and after World War II

1975 ◽  
Vol 342 (1631) ◽  
pp. 457-464 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Research And Development ◽  
Personal Experience ◽  
Statistical Information ◽  
World War ◽  
Cavendish Laboratory ◽  
Before And After ◽  
The Many ◽  
Available Information ◽  
University Laboratory

I started research in the Cavendish Laboratory in Cambridge in 1924, exactly fifty years ago, and I remained a member of the Laboratory until 1960. During that time I spent 15 years before the war, and 15 years after, as a research worker, and during the war I was a member of a government research and development establishment. I shall attempt to compare the methods of working in the Laboratory in the periods before and after the war. The comparison will be based partly on available information about expenditure and number of staff, and partly on personal experience. I shall try to relate differences in the two periods to the experiences of those, like myself, who worked elsewhere during the war, and I shall try to make allowance for changes in the seniority of my position in the Laboratory. Of course I realise that I can speak of only one university physics laboratory out of the many in the country, but I am hopeful that what happened there may not differ too much from what happened elsewhere. It has not been easy to get the appropriate statistical information for the years before 1960. One reason is that the laboratory did not keep detailed records; I shall return to discuss that situation later. Another reason is that it is often difficult to extract the necessary information from the University Reporter because the character of the record is changed from time to time. Although another investigator might produce statistics somewhat different from mine, I nevertheless venture to think that they would lead to the same conclusions.

‘A higher form of listening’: a commentary on ‘the human bodies of World War II: beyond the battlefield’

2020 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 157-158
Author(s):  
Emily Mayhew
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Medical Humanities ◽  
Treatment Options ◽  
Patient Treatment ◽  
Cultural Resources ◽  
World War ◽  
Medical Practitioners ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Potential Patient

This issue’s interdisciplinary range parallels the generative multidisciplinary scope in the developing field of medical humanities. A closely detailed and empathic interdisciplinary analysis of physical and mental injury can offer additional historical and cultural resources to medical practitioners, thus broadening potential patient treatment options beyond institutional and disciplinary boundaries.

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