Article Summary by David Houston Jones

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought into sharp focus the role of medical evidence in public health presentations. This article investigates the rhetoric of those presentations, from ‘podium’ presentations such as press conferences to online forums and visualisations of the virus. In all of these, rhetorical forms arise from the contingent visibility of the virus: despite its ethical engagement with medical evidence, and in marked contrast with the association of the Johnson premiership with the ‘assault on truth’, visualisation is a symptom of a public health crisis. That crisis, I argue, brings with it a crisis of evidence.

Read the full article on the Medical Humanities journal website.

David Houston Jones is Professor of French and Visual Culture, University of Exeter. He works at the intersection of visual, medical and forensic epistemologies, and is the author of Visual Culture and the Forensic (2022), Installation Art and the Practices of Archivalism (2016) and Samuel Beckett and Testimony (2011). He co-edited Samuel Beckett and Contemporary Art (with Rob Reginio and Katherine Weiss, 2017) and Paddy Hartley: of Faces and Facades (with Marjorie Gehrhardt, 2015). He was UK PI on the INTERREG IVa-funded project 1914FACES2014, and subsequently co-edited a special issue of the Journal of War and Culture Studies (2017) entitled Assessing the Legacy of the Gueules cassées: from Surgery to Art.