Focussing on eighteenth and nineteenth-century France, this course seeks to explore relations between portraits of people and portraits of diseases. During the period, pathologies – form morbid organs, via skin diseases to mental disorders – started to be visually recorded in a systematic manner. At the same time portraiture was a popular artistic genre, and yet it was variously contested and challenged during the Enlightenment, the French Revolution and the advent of modernism. The portrait was quite consistently defined by art theorists of the time as the imitation of an individual head that provides a characteristic resemblance. What this means though was less straight forward than it seems at a time during which the human subject was – in political, social, psychological and even physical terms – subject to intense debate, a debate in which the voice of physicians was as crucial as that of philosophers. We will critically engage with issues of resemblance, faciality, intersubjectivity, sociability, subjectivity and subjection, gender, skin colour, physiognomy, and the divide between the normal and the pathological. Key will be the notion of ‘character’ as both human individuals and medical disorders were thought to have ‘characteristic traits’.