In her book, Recycling the disabled: Army, medicine, and modernity in WWI Germany, Heather R. Perry, began by noting that the German veterans who were physically challenged insisted on being called “war cripple” (Kriegskrüppel) to distinguish themselves from the “war...
In 1920, the German artist Otto Dix, an eager volunteer who fought for his country and was wounded multiple times, produced four paintings of disabled veterans. In each of these paintings, the men, mutilated and dismembered by war are missing multiple limbs. Although...
Writing for Smithsonian Magazine, Caroline Alexander explained the importance of the work of the New Zealand reconstructive surgeon, Harold Gilles. She said, “While pioneering work in skin grafting had been done in Germany and the Soviet Union, it was Gillies who...
Before the Great War there seems to have been little attention paid to the state of mind of the patient or to the psychological well being of the medical subject. Although psychology was emerging as a separate field of study, one of the major practitioners, Sigmund...
Whether as a painting or as a photograph or even as a sculpture, portraiture is one of the main achievement of Western art. Perhaps no other culture has been so interested in the human likeness, focusing on the face, its moods, its expressions, as the revelation of a...
Adolf Loos Experimental Architecture and the Question of Windows Before the Great War, Vienna was the city of Otto Wagner, and Loos would have to wait a decade before he would be allowed to build to his own standard of “purity” or lack of inauthentic decoration. Like...
