Industrialised Man. Fritz Kahn’s Visualisations of the Body as a Zone of Interference between Medicine, Engineering, and Culture

At the beginning of the twentieth century, optical and acoustic media revolutionized medical research and provided new means for their popularization. A particularly intriguing example of this interweaving of media, medicine, and culture provide the publications and illustrations of the physician and medical popularizer Fritz Kahn (1888–1968). Especially for visualizing physiological functions, Kahn developed a specific and characteristic graphic style by positioning the human body in industrial modernity and depicting its organs as machines. Kahn enjoyed a huge success with his style, as indicated by the many translations, particularly after his forced emigration to the US because of his Jewish background. Kahn’s images integrate medical advances in a combination of the avant-garde styles of the Neue Sachlichkeit and collage. The visual language of his images demonstrates how nature itself turns into a cultural construction in the exchanges between science and society.

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