Anatomists, social policy makers and artists produced in early 20th century Vienna a variety of images of the human body, that not only gained local relevance and international prominence but had different functions, uses and meanings in changing scientific, political and cultural contexts. Various media of anatomical visualization competed, both in the academic spheres of medical and art schools as well as in several places of popular negotiation and production of visual cultures of medicine, such as museums or public health education.

In my talk I want to explore on the intersections of medical-anatomical image production and transformations of knowledge. Around 1900 Vienna housed one of the leading medical schools. Especially because of the production of prestigious anatomical atlases, the Medical Faculty was a magnet for students and scholars from all over the world. The First World War however, not only made anatomical visualisation a difficult and precarious endeavour within limited personal and material resources but rather means of picturing and propagating future humans and society against the background of key changes in the life sciences, vivid public health debates, aggressive politics and eugenic discourses.

Looking more closely at interwar anatomical image production reveals medical, socio- and biopolitical knowledge in transit. What (epistemic) values determine the specific construction of visual anatomies? What discourses and practices realise actor’s assumptions of corporeality, health, sickness and society and what are the contexts that set the stage for the transformations of knowledge, political, social and symbolic orders, related to image production?

On the basis of five key artefacts - an anatomical atlas, a public health chart, a wire brain model, an oil painting and an x-ray film - I will trace exchange processes between national and global visual cultures to elucidate socio-political and scientific orders at work. Working from and with these artefacts, I plan to tell vivid stories about drawing social landscapes (Latour 2007), producing political images (Rancière 2006), and propagating knowledge about the body. By tracing out these interrelationships, my talk will allow us to take a closer look at urban structures, local milieus and their international networks, thus elucidating, for example, how the first social- democratic anatomical atlas links to hygiene fairs, the global polis and the new visuality of radiokinematography.