“Typical Cases”: Representation, Racializing Medicine, and the Politics of the Case Study in the Moulages Collections of the Hôpital Saint-Louis

Physicians at the hôpital Saint-Louis prized their collection of wax models (moulages) for their precise representation of color: a central project of dermatology. Close looking at the collection, however, reveals the repeated use of a consistent light skin tone across the vast majority of models. Given physicians’ investment in chromatic precision, how might we understand this generic attention to skin coloration? “Typical Cases” asks how, when, and why skin pigmentation mattered to fin-de-siècle dermatologists. I first argue that the overrepresentation of light skin tones comprises an aesthetic choice made by model-makers and their physician-patrons. I subsequently ask how this aesthetic choice relates to the 19th-century medical case study. Whose body can be a useful case study, and within what epistemological frames? Beyond investigations of representation, such questions bear on how medicine racialized bodies and whom physicians imagined they could offer particular kinds of care, in both the past and the present.