The Visual and Literary Arts in Occupational and Environmental Medicine

The role of the visual and literary arts as a source of commentary and historical perspective on occupational and environmental health has received relatively little attention. From the literary perspective, there is a legacy of allusions to occupational hazards as rich as that from classical medical writing with many key texts are preserved in classical satires. There are also scattered early visual depictions documenting manual trades. Despite the emergence of focused biomedical interest in the diseases of workers and well as a newfound appreciation of the rights of man during the Western Enlightenment, the subject of work-related hazards continued to be ignored in the visual and literary arts. Only somewhat later, the Industrial Revolution and its working conditions began to be noticed first by British novelists and poets. By the concluding decades of the 19th century, the visual fine arts, too, began to depict manual laborers as worthy of attention treatment and even were treated as frankly sensual subjects. In the same period, environmental pollution became an important influence in the Impressionist vision of the urban landscape. With the realist movement in literature, the conditions of workers, from the coal mine to the slaughterhouse, explicitly came to the fore. It was not until the period between the Wars, however, that workers and working conditions were front and center in an aesthetic of proletarianism concurrent in both the visual arts and literature. Of particular note, photography was a medium that emerged with a particularly successful integration of powerful artistic and overtly political concerns. Indeed, in important ways, photographic art has continued this tradition throughout the post-World War II period, even as other creative impulses weakened. In summary, the humanities have much to teach about working life and the environment, if we are willing to learn.