![]() Regular readers know I am no friend of eugenics, but I am aware of the the argument that a contaminated source need not pollute all its fruits. Galton, the leading statistician of his age and a central figure in the development of mathematical economics, developed many of his tools, including the composite portrait, in order to make various components of eugenics properly scientific. Khan's (2004) use of the composite portrait.++ In particular, the question I wish to explore here is how one can begin to characterize a collective way of thinking (arguing, conceptualizing, etc.) when the underlying source materials are composed of individuals who also, as it happens, embrace individuality. It's much more nebulous to try, with the methods of contemporary scholarship, to characterize precisely (the ideas, arguments, views, concepts of) a Zeitgeist, a tradition, a collective, and a (dynamic) style.+ In fact, for example, few allow that Zeitgeist is a legitimate concept to be deployed in one's scholarshop. These methods all treat the sources as evidence, and the scholar as a kind of detective (see Goldenbaum) piecing the material together for some end (historical truth, argumentative progress, conceptual articulation, historical meaning, etc.). Smith), on the whole these methods are designed to focus on describing, interpreting, and tracing (the influence of) the views of authors, ideas, concepts, and arguments. While there are attempts to bring the techniques of the study of material cultures and, even archeology, to bear on it ( see J.H. The contemporary methods of the history of philosophy are fine-tuned to study texts and arguments. Galton (1879) "Composite Portraits, Made by Combining Those of Many Different Persons Into a Single Resultant Figure," The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, 134. The merit of the photographic composite is its mechanical precision, being subject to no errors beyond those incidental to all photo graphic productions.-F. But the imaginative power even of the highest artists is far from precise, and is so apt to be biassed by special cases that may have struck their fancies, that no two artists agree in any of their typical forms. For use information, consult Public Services at host institution for more information.A composite portrait represents the picture that would rise before the mind's eye of a man who had the gift of pictorial imagination in an exalted degree. The Boston Medical Library does not hold copyright on all materials in this collection. Series: Boston Medical Library Subjects: Bowditch, H. Countway Library of Medicine) Collection (local): Boston Medical Libraryīoston Medical Library Rare Books Collection (2.Am.205) Location: Center for the History of Medicine (Francis A. Yet, as I have said, it is no such thing it is the portrait of a type, and not of an individual.” Two page spread about composite portraits from the publication of the second International Exhibition of EugenicsĬreator: Bowditch, H. Nobody who glanced at one of them for the first time, would doubt its being the likeness of a living person. These ideal faces have a surprising air of reality. Galton said, “The photographic process of which I there spoke, enables us to obtain with mechanical precision a generalised picture one that represents no man in particular, but portrays an imaginary figure, possessing the average features of any given group of men. While the composite photographs on display here as well as others in the collections of the Countway were created by physiologist Henry Pickering Bowditch, the development and original interpretation of the composite process with its eugenic implications was the work of Sir Francis Galton, who first published his research as “Composite portraits,” in Nature in 1878. An arrangement of composite portraits by Henry Pickering Bowditch (1840-1911) in the publication from the second International Exhibition of Eugenics in 1921.
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