Imagining Medicine was a collaboration with Dr Cordelia Warr and Prof Tony Freemont funded by Manchester University and based on the Early Medical collections in The John Rylands Library working with both Art History and Medical students who selected the illustrations and then re-performed them.
The photographs through their absurdist use of hammers, vacuum cleaners, tongs, and hacksaws help make explicit to contemporary audiences the lack of anaesthesia available at the time this book was written. Thus helping us to re-imagine what it might have felt like to experience as a patient, the operations shown in these 17th century books.
These photographs take their inspiration from Gaspare Tagliacozzi’s De Curtorum Chirurgia per Insitionem (On the surgical restoration of defects by grafting) (1597).
Bonnell’s photographs were inspired by the image of nose models as featured in Taglioacozzi’s book. They not only address notions of behaviour in the wearing of a false nose but also refer to characters form fiction where noses are prominent e.g. Pinnochio, Cyrano de Bergerac, Coco the Clown – all of whom are male. For Bonnell this was a perfect foil to the all-female ‘cast’ portrayed in the Surgical re-enactments.