[Visualization between popularity and scientific practice: new perspectives for the history of medicine, science, and...

The paper investigates how visual resources can be fruitfully used to study the history of science, medicine, and technology from a practical point of view. Two new international and interdisciplinary trends within recent historiography are reviewed: the history of visualisation and the history of popularisation. The results of both trends need to be combined in order to understand the ways in which images of science have been used to communicate science from its place of production within the laboratory to its users within the wider society. From the proposed perspective, visual representations of science (i.e. portraits, images of scientific instruments, measurement results and abstractions) are discussed as a distinct medium in which knowledge producers have transmitted and transformed their findings to the acquirers of knowledge. The paper introduces the wider historiographical framework for a discussion of the following four papers published in this issue of NTM.