7/4/2023 0 Comments Patricia faraIt has always struck me how incredibly informative and informed they are. Why study historical scientific caricatures? Fara explains how they recorded the tensions - and the colonialism, racism and sexism - that swirled around the birth of modern Western science. Later, as cheap newspapers became available, black-and-white cartoons proliferated. Before the rise of mass publishing, they were sold as individual engravings, often hand-coloured and displayed in shop windows to be appreciated by passers-by and purchased by the wealthy to impress house guests. The memes of their day, these images reached much of literate society and influenced public opinion. In a yet-to-be-published project, Fara has curated 42 scientific cartoons and caricatures from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, mainly from the United Kingdom and the United States.ĭuring this period, artists such as William Hogarth and James Gillray skewered the social and political tensions around emerging scientific, medical and technological ideas, from electricity to vaccination. Along the way, she’s collected illustrations. Patricia Fara, a historian of science at the University of Cambridge, UK, has written for decades about subjects from Isaac Newton to the women who worked as researchers during the First World War. Credit: Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Division James Gillray’s 1802 illustration explores fears about using cowpox to vaccinate against smallpox.
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