This wax moulage from the late 19th century represents the chest area of a female subject. Syphilitic sores are painted red around the mammary papillae. They are described in French as “chancres nains des mamelons. Maladie syphilitique”.
This 3D digital copy produced by stitching together hundreds of photographs allows viewers an unsettling episode of web browsing: we can look at the historic artefact from all possible angles, an interaction which would have not been possible in a museum. The 3D object turns us into medical professionals. I suddenly become the avatar of a student of medicine, able to closely analyse the cutaneous manifestations of syphilis. Too closely maybe, since I am not a student of medicine, and I lack the necessary anatomical or dermatological knowledge to do this scientifically.
So what can I make of this digital copy of another copy (a wax moulage) of a human body?
I begin by looking at it from all angles, awkwardly, while trying to make sense of it. As well as make sense of the entire digital experience. The moulage brings to mind the hyperrealistic resin sculptures by Ron Mueck or of Lucien Freud’s paintings of deformed anatomies. While the precision of the 3D copy adds to the disconcerting situation, enabling me to inspect the fine morphology of a baren human body, diseased, foreign, cut apart and wrapped in white cloth.
No matter how I turn this, clockwise or counterclockwise, on my computer screen or inside my head, the feeling of profound dis-ease remains: there is a lingering sense that I should at once stop doing this. To stare like this at a human body which many years ago belonged to someone I know absolutely nothing about. Other than it was once a person, a patient who presented at the “service du professeur Fournier”. Was she a woman infected with syphilis by her husband who came home after messing around in the parisian “underworld”? Was she a “wet nurse” who might have caught it from a baby she unknowingly breastfed? Could she have been a sex worker seeking assistance at Paris’ leading venereal hospital? Perhaps her sick body had been paraded in front of attending male students, before being cast as the wax sculpture we can now view on our screens?
Try to move the wax away from you and place it so that you can look at it from high above, as if it were your own body, as if you were inspecting your own chest, this moulage becoming your own diseased body, real, un-young, un-academic. The 3D experience changes the museographical experience entirely turning the history cards over in a radical and unexpected way. By being able to manipulate the object I am able to reposition my “gaze” (the “museographical gaze”, the “medical gaze”, the “clinical gaze”, the “male gaze”, you name it).
No longer am I examining it with the “student gaze”, or the historian gaze, or the absent minded look of a bored visitor in a dusty museum. The 3D perspective enables me to reposition the object so that I see it, for a few uncomfortable seconds, superimposed on my own body, replacing mine. This body might have been mine: this is not a patient from a distant past, a distant culture, or a different social reality. This is now my body, my disease, my pain. Try it yourself. Can you feel the suffering and the shame and the unease from being stared at? Good. Now you know.
Radu Suciu, University of Geneva (Decembre 2023)
