My current research explores the entanglements of medicine and art in relation to the manuscript paintings (c.1580) of the English barber-surgeon John Banister. I interrogate the movement of images and ideas, as well as of material transformations and translations between print and painting – with a particular interest in how printed images originally produced in France and Italy are reinterpreted through the visual vocabulary of limning and heraldry. I see this research as contributing to expanding fields of interest in the social histories of medicine, the role of publishing in the growth of medical professions in England, and art historical investigations of the connections between health and painting. As Richard Haydocke’s Tracte of Painting, published in 1598 attests, physicians were often artists, and, as Susan Berger argues in her 2007 book, The Art of Philosophy, images were crucial instruments in the production of – and intellectual engagement with – knowledge. Building on the important contributions of historians like Tara Hamling and Robert Tittler, who have done much to readdress assumptions about vernacular English painting, especially civic portraiture and the material culture of the 'middling sort' – as well as Deborah Harkness's exploration of the knowledge borne out of collaboration between merchants, alchemists, instrument makers etc. in Elizabethan London – I aim to uncover how novel technologies of vision worked together to reshape perceptions of the human body and its relation to the wider world. These include, for instance, print, navigational instruments, lenses, maps and globes. 

I recently presented a paper on this topic at cross-disciplinary workshop Veiling the Body: Cloth, Skin, Membrane, Paper at the John Rylands Research Institute (June 11–12, 2020) and I am currently working on an article, tentatively titled ‘The scalpel, the brush and the printing press: anatomical and professional mobility in Early Modern England’, to submit to a peer-reviewed journal in my field.