Communicating the Modern Body: Fritz Kahn’s Popular Images of Human Physiology as an Industrialized World

Abstract

The visualization of the human body has always been a highly popular affair, and popular science writing has been particularly perceptive as to how new media has revolutionized science. This article analyzes the intertwining of science, culture, and technology by investigating the lavishly illustrated publications of Fritz Kahn, arguably one of the most successful popular science writers internationally between 1920 and 1960. His illustrations developed a specific style of visualization that positioned the human body firmly in an industrial modernity of machine analogues, which he eventually copyrighted as a product line. This visual crossover between industrialization and science demonstrates surprisingly accurately how human nature becomes historically contingent and culturally encoded.