Putting the ‘me’ in mechanical: lessons from the mechanical men of health 1928–1948

Abstract

ReuseThis article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs (CC BY-NC-ND) licence. This licence only allows you to download this work and share it with others as long as you credit the authors, but you can't change the article in any way or use it commercially. More information and the full terms of the licence here: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/ Takedown If you consider content in White Rose Research Online to be in breach of UK law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the URL of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. ABSTRACTDuring the interwar years health exhibitions and pavilions were commonplace in Europe and the U.S. Within these exhibitions were a small number of life-sized or over-sized mechanical men used to represent physiological processes. Though they received significant press attention at the time, little academic analysis exists to-date. These mechanical men, I argue, all provide important insights regarding the way design could be used to heighten the appeal of physiology and crucially, in the formation of a new term -the Accessible Body.Firstly, this study re-introduces three mechanical men of health to an academic audience, identifying provenance and unearthing key details of their performance and visual appearance. I argue that there is much to be gained by their analysis in comparison to the more notorious body representations that they orbited. Through detailed analysis of their forms, the three mechanical men are shown to challenge the dominant notions of the Ideal Body and Fordist Body embodied in the Dresden Transparent Man (1930) and ÔDer Mensch als IndustriepalastÕ (1926) respectively. The study examines and classifies these mechanical men as a new type of body Ð the Accessible Body. This term refers to representations that embody a sense of consciousness, the re-appropriation of popular culture and engagement with humour and visual appeal.The study concludes with discussion about the Accessible Body in contemporary health education. What tropes and approaches may remain significant today? By leaning on contemporary thinking about linguistic rather than visual metaphors in health this study concludes with provocations for the alignment of other appropriate metaphors within a mechanical man and Accessible Body framework. Ultimately I call for a re-shifting of man/machine visual metaphors as a means of re-engaging the audience today.