The Corner Society "Edvard Munch and the Medicalization of Modern Life"

Edvard Munch, On the Operating Table, 1902-03. Oil on canvas, 109 x 149.5 cm. Munch Museum, Oslo, MM.M.00022

Dr. Allison Morehead, Professor, Department of Art History and Art Conservation, Queen's University, Canada

Edvard Munch and the Medicalization of Modern Life

Stemming from the artist's numerous lived medical experiences and his embeddedness in medical milieu, Edvard Munch's art offers critical perspectives on the medicalization of modern life. This talk explores Munch's "medical" art, as well as the curatorial strategies - including juxtaposing Munch's art with objects from the history of medicine - that Allison Morehead is using to encourage new forms of public engagement in histories of modern medicine.

Allison Morehead is a historian of modern European art focused on entangled relationships between art and the medicalization of modern life. Morehead is the author of Nature’s Experiments and the Search for Symbolist Form, Series: Refiguring Modernism (Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), the co-editor of the forthcoming Art and the Critical Medical Humanities, Series: Critical Interventions in the Medical and Health Humanities (Bloomsbury Academic, 2025), and the curator of the exhibition Lifeblood/Livsblod: Edvard Munch (Munch Museum, Oslo, 2025)