Lithographic prints of blown-up torsos covered in bumps, children’s faces hot with rashes, and other intimate and off-putting images line the hallway as you enter the Cushing Medical Library at Yale Medical School. Two Yale dermatologists, Jean Bolognia, MED ’80, and Irwin Braverman, MED ’55, present the raw new show “Historical Illustrations of Skin Diseases: Selections from the New Sydenham Society Atlas 1860-1884.” These images were designed to teach doctors about skin diseases. Now, the passing of time has rendered the images irrelevant as tools but still intriguingly gross.
You enter the exhibit by accident when walking into the Cushing Medical Library. Nine lithographs adorn an otherwise blank hallway between the lobby and the reading rooms. Visitors are invited to take a catalogue, which is the size of a short novel, when entering. Emblazoned in Sharpie with the warning, “Do Not Remove from Library Exhibition,” the book offers a guide for how to identify the macabre disease each subject displays. The catalogue is a reference book about various diseases, not specifically designed for the exhibition.
The experience of pawing through a physical catalogue in an exhibition grounded in the encyclopedic organization of factual information feels appropriate. This visual distraction from some of the particularly gruesome lithographs was welcome.
The subjects of the clinical illustrations gaze out with unsettling emotional pain. Hollow eyes stare out from a child’s bump-encrusted red face. The goal is to show diseased skin; any human expression that shines through is incidental. For a squeamish viewer, it is difficult to gaze at these unbridled depictions of human discomfort as one would a piece of art. The impulse is to look away.
Medical students swoosh back and forth through the corridor, few taking time to admire (or not) the images plastering the walls. As I stare at a stoic bust riddled with pink pustules, then glance at a passing medical student, the clarity of his skin leaps out at me. I look down at my own clear arm, then at a lupus-covered subject on the wall. The diseased objects on the wall contrast the healthy subjects in the exhibit; other spectators become objects of fascination.
More incidental than intentional, the layout of the exhibit is constricted by the unorthodox space. The first section is set in a thoroughfare, not a gallery. This hall flows into a rounded atrium, which branches off into different reading rooms. Again, the space is a liminal one, and it is awkward to stop and linger here. This atrium room houses another round of lithographs, these ones encased in glass below eye level. The transition between the two sections is clumsy, as the images do not reflect the different feels of the cloistered hall and open atrium.
Designed for education rather than pleasure, the images in this exhibit impact viewers with images that will be difficult to un-see. My skin crawled as I tried to force myself to examine each piece. By the end, I was happy to leave. When I retreated through the hallway I’d entered through, I ignored the images on the walls and headed straight toward the exit.