Mary Hunter

Biography

Mary Hunter joined the faculty at McGill in 2008 after completing her PhD at University College London. She specializes in nineteenth-century French art and visual culture, and teaches classes on modern and contemporary art. Her research projects and publications examine: the relationship between art and medicine; the role of contemporary and historical art and material culture in hospitals; theories of time; the competing claims to truth made by different media, formal practices and discourses; the formation of identities and how they pertain to sexuality, gender, race, sickness and health; the relationship between popular, artistic and scientific spectacles; the politics of looking; and the phenomenology of waiting.  Hunter’s research has been funded by the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, the University of London, the New York Academy of Medicine, McGill University, the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and the Fonds de recherche du Québec–Société et Culture.    

Research Interest

Hunter’s recent book, The Face of Medicine: Visualising Medical Masculinities in late Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester University Press, December 2015), explores why, how and where the worlds of art and medicine overlapped during the Third Republic in France through an analysis of visual representations of 3 prominent medical men: the chemist, Louis Pasteur, the neurologist, Jean-Martin Charcot, and the surgeon, Jules-Émile Péan. Through an examination of sources surrounding the production, display and receptions of the imagery surrounding these men, Hunter considers how artists and physicians worked together to create realistic representations of bodies. By examining various objects – Salon portraits, medical text books, artists’ manuals, paintings, encyclopedias, doctors’ letters and meeting notes, caricatures, dictionaries, novels, professional purchases, newspapers, art reviews, and, importantly, the multiple objects found in medical museums and hospitals, such as wax models, photographs, plaster casts, marble busts and drawings – Hunter explores what is at stake in the relationship between art and medical iconography.