The anatomy theater is where students of the human body learn to isolate structures in decaying remains, scrutinize their parts, and assess their importance. Taking a new look at the history of anatomy, the author places public dissections alongside private ones to show how the anatomical theater was both a space of philosophical learning and a place where students learned to behave in a civil manner towards their teachers, their peers, and the corpse.
Gross anatomy, the study of anatomical structures that can be seen by unassisted vision, has long been a subject of fascination for artists. For most modern viewers, however, the anatomy lesson—the technically precise province of clinical surgeons and medical faculties—hardly seems the proper breeding ground for the hybrid workings of art and theory. We forget that, in its early stages, anatomy pursued the highly theatrical spirit of Renaissance science, as painters such as Rembrandt and Da Vinci and medical instructors like Fabricius of Aquapendente shared audiences devoted to the workings of the human body. Anatomy Live: Performance and the Operating Theatre, a remarkable consideration of new developments on the stage, as well as in contemporary writings of theorists such as Donna Haraway and Brian Massumi, turns our modern notions of the dissecting table on its head—using anatomical theatre as a means of obtaining a fresh perspective on representations of the body, conceptions of subjectivity, and own knowledge about science and the stage. Critically dissecting well-known exhibitions like Body Worlds and The Visible Human Project and featuring contributions from a number of diverse scholars on such subjects as the construction of spectatorship and the implications of anatomical history, Anatomy Live is not to be missed by anyone with an interest in this engaging intersection of science and artistic practice.
The space of Renaissance anatomy is not solely in the physical theatre. As this collection demonstrates, the space of the theatre encompasses every aspect of Renaissance culture, from its education systems, art, and writing to its concepts of identity, citizenship, and the natural world. This book argues that Renaissance anatomy theatres were spaces of intersection that influenced every aspect of their culture, and that scholars should broaden their concept of anatomy theatres to include more than the physical space of the theatre itself. Instead, we should approach the anatomy theatres as spaces where cultural expression is influenced by the hands-on study of human cadavers. This book enters the ongoing conversation surrounding Renaissance anatomy by dialogically engaging with such scholars as Jonathan Sawaday, Merry E. Wiesner-Hanks, Kathryn Schwarz, and primary texts such as ‘De humani corporis fabric’, Montaigne’s ‘Essais’, and Shakespearean plays. The book also features Renaissance artwork alongside works by Laurence Winram.
Of enduring historical and contemporary interest, the anatomy theater is where students of the human body learn to isolate structures in decaying remains, scrutinize their parts, and assess their importance. Taking a new look at the history of anatomy, Cynthia Klestinec places public dissections alongside private ones to show how the anatomical theater was both a space of philosophical learning, which contributed to a deeper scientific analysis of the body, and a place where students learned to behave, not with ghoulish curiosity, but rather in a civil manner toward their teachers, their peers, and the corpse. Klestinec argues that the drama of public dissection in the Renaissance (which on occasion included musical accompaniment) served as a ploy to attract students to anatomical study by way of anatomy’s philosophical dimensions rather than its empirical offerings. While these venues have been the focus of much scholarship, the private traditions of anatomy comprise a neglected and crucial element of anatomical inquiry. Klestinec shows that in public anatomies, amid an increasingly diverse audience—including students and professors, fishmongers and shoemakers—anatomists emphasized the conceptual framework of natural philosophy, whereas private lessons afforded novel visual experiences where students learned about dissection, observed anatomical particulars, considered surgical interventions, and eventually speculated on the mechanical properties of physiological functions. Theaters of Anatomy focuses on the post-Vesalian era, the often-overlooked period in the history of anatomy after the famed Andreas Vesalius left the University of Padua. Drawing on the letters and testimony of Padua's medical students, Klestinec charts a new history of anatomy in the Renaissance, one that characterizes the role of the anatomy theater and reconsiders the pedagogical debates and educational structure behind human dissection.
Sets out to reconstruct and analyze the rationality of Phineas Fletcher's use of figurality in The Purple Island (1633) - a poetic allegory of human anatomy. This book demonstrates that the analogies and metaphors of literary works share coherence and consistency with anatomy textbooks.
Sir Charles Bell was among the last of a generation medical men who formed their careers, their research, and their publications through the private classrooms of early-nineteenth-century London; whose ambitions for reform were fundamentally about conserving something quintessentially British; and whose politics were shaped by the exigencies of developing a living through various kinds of patronage in a time when careers in medical science simply did not exist. Within a decade or two that world was gone. Professionalization and regularized educationthe ambitions of reformershad been realized, along with regular career paths. With that change, the classroom shattered, its functions divided among other spaces, each with its own audience and function: the laboratory, the clinic, the classroom. They are the spaces of modern medicine, the ones we recognize today, and we see them as the hallmark of medical science. Through Bell s story, artfully told by the author, we witness medical science and medical reform in London s classrooms at a time when modern medicine, with its practical universities with set curricula, staffed by medical professionals, was being born. "
In practice medical practitioners, especially physicians and surgeons, have always had to learn some type of detachment or dispassion. To elucidate what was medical dispassion in seventeenth and eighteenth century England, how and why it was taught, to whom, and in what spaces, each chapter of this book examines a community of practitioners and explores different patterns of medical education, clinical practice, social institutions, and philosophical and religious ideas.
This volume explores the growing range of practices such as piercing, tattooing, branding, cutting and inserting implants which have sprung up recently in the West.
Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In this highly original book, Rose Marie San Juan confronts the question of violence in the making of the early modern anatomical image. Engaging the ways in which power operated in early modern anatomical images in Europe and, to a lesser extent, its colonies, San Juan examines literal violence upon bodies in a range of civic, religious, pedagogical, and “exploratory” contexts. She then works through the question of how bodies were thought to be constituted—systemic or piecemeal, singular or collective—and how gender determines this question of constitution. In confronting the issue of violence in the making of the anatomical image, San Juan explores not only how violence transformed the body into a powerful and troubling double but also how this kind of body permeated attempts to produce knowledge about the world at large. Provocative and challenging, this book will be of significant interest to scholars across fields in early modern studies, including art history and visual culture, science, and medicine.
