Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Anatomy: Representations of the Body in Two and Three Dimensions

  • Reference work entry
  • First Online:
The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences

  • 976 Accesses

Abstract

This chapter traces the history of anatomical representations in Western medicine and culture since the Renaissance, and assesses the changing analytical perspectives brought to images of the human body by historians of science, medicine, and art. In particular, the chapter focuses on the ways in which representations of the body have been used to define and demarcate humanity, and the role such images have played for creating and challenging boundaries of gender, race, and species. The chapter also investigates the role of anatomical images for articulations of expertise, class, and professional status, as well as key scholarly works on the epistemology of images. It finishes with a brief account of contemporary interactions of art and anatomy.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
Chapter
USD 29.95
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
eBook
USD 549.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Hardcover Book
USD 699.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Amirault C (1993–94) Posing the subject of early medical photography. Discourse 16(2):51–76

    Google Scholar 

  • Berkowitz C (2011) The beauty of anatomy: visual displays and surgical education in early nineteenth-century London. Bull Hist Med 85(2):248–271

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Berkowitz C (2015) Charles Bell and the anatomy of reform. University of. Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Biddiss MD (1976) The politics of anatomy: Dr. Robert Knox and Victorian racism. Proc R Soc Med 69:245–250

    Google Scholar 

  • Bittel C (2019) Unpacking the phrenological toolkit: knowledge and identity in antebellum America. In: Bittel C, Leong E, von Oertzen C (eds) Working with paper: gendered practices in the history of knowledge. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, pp 91–107

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Blanckaert C (2009) De la race à l’évolution. Paul Broca et l’anthropologie française, 1850–1900. Harmattan, Paris

    Google Scholar 

  • Bucci M (1969) Anatomia come arte. Edizioni d’Arte Il Fiorino, Florence

    Google Scholar 

  • Buckley C (2020) Pathos, eros, and curiosity: the history and reception of ivory anatomical models from the seventeenth century to today. Nuncius Ann Storia della Scienza 35(1):64–89

    Google Scholar 

  • Callen A (1995) The spectacular body: science, method, and meaning in the work of Degas. Yale University Press, New Haven

    Google Scholar 

  • Carlino A (1995) Knowe thyself: anatomical figures in early modern Europe. RES Anthropol Aesthet 27:52–69

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Chaplin S (2012) The divine touch, or touching divines: John Hunter, David Hume, and the Bishop of Durham’s rectum. In: Deutsch H, Terrall M (eds) Vital matters: eighteenth century views of conception, life, death. University of Toronto Press, Toronto

    Google Scholar 

  • Choulant L (1852) Geschichte und Bibliographie der anatomischen Abbildung nach ihrer Beziehung auf anatomische Wissenschaft und bildende Kunst: Nebst Auswahl von Illustrationen nach berühmten Künstlern. Rudolph Weigel, Leipzig

    Google Scholar 

  • Craske M (2011) “Unwholesome” and “pornographic”: a reassessment of the place of Rackstrow’s Museum in the story of eighteenth-century anatomical collection and exhibition. J Hist Collect 23(1):75–99

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Cryle P, Stephens E (2017) Normality: a critical genealogy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Cunningham A (2010) The anatomist anatomis’d: an experimental discipline in enlightenment Europe. Ashgate, Aldershot

    Google Scholar 

  • Curran AS (2011) The anatomy of blackness: science and slavery in an age of Enlightenment. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore

    Google Scholar 

  • Curtis S (2012) Photography and medical observation. In: Anderson N, Dietrich MR (eds) The educated eye. Visual culture and pedagogy in the life sciences. Dartmouth College Press, Hanover, pp 68–93

    Google Scholar 

  • Dacome L (2017) Malleable anatomies: models, makers and material culture in eighteenth-century Italy. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Daston L, Galison P (2007) Objectivity. Zone Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Didi-Huberman G (1999) Ouvrir Vénus. Nudité, rêve, cruauté. Gallimard, Paris

    Google Scholar 

  • Duden B (1998) The woman beneath the skin: a doctor’s patients in eighteenth-​century Germany (trans: Dunlap T). Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA

    Google Scholar 

  • Fend M (2017) Fleshing out surfaces: skin in French art and medicine, 1650–1850. Manchester University Press, Manchester

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Fox DM, Lawrence C (1988) Photographing medicine: images and power in Britain and America since 1840. Greenwood, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Gelfand T (1980) Professionalizing modern medicine: Paris surgeons and medical science and institutions in the 18th century. Greenwood, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Gilman S (1986) Difference and pathology: stereotypes of sexuality, race, and madness. Cornell University Press, Ithaca

    Google Scholar 

  • Hacking I (1990) The taming of chance. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Hagner M (1999) Enlightened monsters. In: Clark W, Golinski J, Schaffer S (eds) The sciences in enlightened Europe. University of Chicago Press, Chicago/London

    Google Scholar 

  • Hallam E (2016) Anatomy museum: death and the body displayed. Reaktion Books, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Haraway D (1989) Primate visions: gender, race, and nature in the world of modern science. Routledge, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Hopwood N (2004) Plastic publishing in embryology. In: de Chadarevian S, Hopwood N (eds) Models: the third dimension of science. Stanford University Press, Stanford, pp 170–206

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Hopwood N (2012) A marble embryo: meanings of a portrait from 1900. Hist Work J 73(1):5–36

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Hopwood N (2015) Haeckel’s embryos: images, evolution, and fraud. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Huistra H (2018) The afterlife of the Leiden anatomical collections: hands on, hands off. Routledge, London

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Jordanova L (1989) Sexual visions: images of gender in science and medicine between the eighteenth and twentieth centuries. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison

    Google Scholar 

  • Jordanova L (2000) Defining features: Scientific and medical portraits, 1660–2000. Reaktion Books, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Jordanova L (2003) Portraits, people and things: Richard Mead and medical identity. Hist Sci 41(3):293–313

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Jülich S (2018) Picturing abortion opposition in Sweden: Lennart Nilsson’s early photographs of embryos and fetuses. Soc Hist Med 31(2):278–307

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Katzew I (2005) Casta painting: images of race in eighteenth-century Mexico. Yale University Press, New Haven

    Google Scholar 

  • Kemp M, Wells M (eds) (2000) Spectacular bodies: the art and science of the human body from Leonardo to now. Hayward Gallery, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Kevles B (1997) Naked to the bone: medical imaging in the twentieth century. Rutgers University Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Klestinec C (2011) Theaters of anatomy: students, teachers, and traditions of dissection in renaissance Venice. Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore

    Google Scholar 

  • Kusukawa S (2012) Picturing the book of nature: image, text, and argument in sixteenth-century human anatomy and medical botany. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Löwy I (2013) Sex on a slide: Antoine Lacassagne and the search for a microscopic definition of masculinity and femininity. Hist Philos Life Sci 35(3):363–378

    Google Scholar 

  • Maerker A (2011) Model experts: wax anatomies and enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815. Manchester University Press, Manchester

    Google Scholar 

  • Maerker A (2019) Papier-mâché anatomical models: the making of reform and empire in nineteenth-century France and beyond. In: Bittel C, Leong E, von Oertzen C (eds) Working with paper: gendered practices in the history of knowledge. University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, pp 177–192

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Maerker A (forthcoming) Anatomical preparations and mimetic expertise. In: Bol M, Spary E (eds) The matter of mimesis. Studies on mimesis and materials in nature, art and science. Brill, Leiden

    Google Scholar 

  • Margócsy D, Somos M, Joffe SN (2018) The Fabrica of Andreas Vesalius: a worldwide descriptive census, ownership, and annotations of the 1543 and 1555 editions. Brill, Leiden

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Martínez ME (2008) Genealogical fictions: limpieza de sangre, religion, and gender in colonial Mexico. Stanford University Press, Stanford

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Meijer MC (1999) Race and aesthetics in the anthropology of Petrus Camper (1722–1789). Rodopi, Amsterdam/Atlanta

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Meli DB (2018) Visualizing disease: the art and history of pathological illustrations. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Morgan JL (1997) ‘Some could suckle over their shoulder’: male travelers, female bodies, and the gendering of racial ideology, 1500–1770. The William and Mary Quarterly 54(1):167–192

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Mosse GL (1978) Toward the final solution: a history of European racism. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison

    Google Scholar 

  • Muratori C (2017) From animal bodies to human souls: (pseudo-)Aristotelian animals in Della Porta’s physiognomics. Early Sci Med 22(1):1–23

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Nemec B (2020) Norm und Reform. Anatomische Körperbilder in Wien um 1925, Wallstein, Göttingen

    Google Scholar 

  • Nutton V (1993) Wittenberg anatomy. In: Grell OP, Cunningham A (eds) Medicine and the reformation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp 11–30

    Google Scholar 

  • Park K, Daston LJ (1998) Wonders and the order of nature, 1150–1750. Zone Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Pogliano C (2019) Unconventional views of racial brains in the 19th century. Nuncius 34(3):602–634

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Porter R (1985) The patient’s view: doing medical history from below. Theory Soc 14(2):175–198

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Poskett J (2019) Materials of the mind: phrenology, race, and the global history of science, 1815–1920. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Book  Google Scholar 

  • Petherbridge D, Jordanova L (1997) The quick and the dead: artists and anatomy. South Bank Centre, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Qureshi S (2004) Displaying Sara Baartman, the “Hottentot Venus”. Hist Sci 42(2):233–257

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Rabinow P (1991) The Foucault reader. Penguin, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Richardson R (1987) Death, dissection, and the destitute. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Richardson R (2008) The making of Mr. Gray’s anatomy. Oxford University Press, Oxford; New York

    Google Scholar 

  • Riskin J (2016) The restless clock: a history of the centuries-long argument over what makes living things tick. University of Chicago Press, Chicago

    Google Scholar 

  • Roberts KB, Tomlinson JDW (1992) The fabric of the body: European traditions of anatomical illustration. Clarendon Press, Oxford

    Google Scholar 

  • Ruiz-Gómez N (2019) The model patient: observation and illustration at the Musée Charcot. In: Graciano A (ed) Visualizing the body in art, anatomy, and medicine since 1800: models and modeling. Routledge, London, pp 203–232

    Chapter  Google Scholar 

  • Sappol M (2017) Body modern: Fritz Kahn, scientific illustration, and the homuncular subject. University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis

    Google Scholar 

  • Sawday J (1995) The body emblazoned: dissection and the human body in Renaissance culture. Routledge, London

    Google Scholar 

  • Schiebinger L (1986) Skeletons in the closet: the first illustrations of the female skeleton in eighteenth-century anatomy. Representations 14:42–82

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Schiebinger L (1990) The anatomy of difference: race and sex in eighteenth-century science. Eighteenth-Century Stud 23(4):387–405

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sekula A (1986) The body and the archive. October 39:3–64

    Google Scholar 

  • Sigerist H (1945) Civilization and disease. Cornell University Press, Ithaca

    Google Scholar 

  • Siraisi N (1994) Vesalius and human diversity in De humani corporis fabrica. J Warburg Courtauld Institutes 57:60–88

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Sowerwinea C (2003) Woman’s brain, man’s brain: feminism and anthropology in late nineteenth-century France. Women’s Hist Rev 12(2):289–308

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • Stafford BM (1991) Body criticism: imaging the unseen in enlightenment art and medicine. Cambridge, MA, M.I.T Press

    Google Scholar 

  • Staum MS (2003) Labeling people: French scholars on society, race and empire, 1815–1848. McGill-Queen’s University Press, Montreal

    Google Scholar 

  • Stephens E (2011) Anatomy as spectacle: public exhibitions of the body from 1700 to the present. Liverpool University Press, Liverpool

    Google Scholar 

  • Stolberg M (2003) A woman down to her bones: the anatomy of sexual difference in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. Isis 94:274–299

    Article  Google Scholar 

  • von Schlosser J (1911) Geschichte der Porträtbildnerei in Wachs. Translated in Panzanelli R (ed) (2008) Ephemeral bodies: wax sculpture and the human figure. Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles, pp 171–314

    Google Scholar 

  • Voss J (2010) Darwin’s pictures: views of evolutionary theory, 1837–1874. Yale University Press, New Haven

    Google Scholar 

  • Warner JH, Edmonson JM (2009) Dissection: photographs of a rite of passage in American medicine, 1880–1930. Blast Books, New York

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. History, King’s College London, London, UK

    Anna Maerker

Authors
  1. Anna Maerker
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anna Maerker .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Victoria University, Melbourne, VIC, Australia

    David McCallum

Section Editor information

  1. University of Lucerne, Lucerne, Switzerland

    Marianne Sommer

  2. Department of History and Philosophy of Science, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK

    Staffan Müller-Wille

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2022 The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.

About this entry

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this entry

Maerker, A. (2022). Anatomy: Representations of the Body in Two and Three Dimensions. In: McCallum, D. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of the History of Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-7255-2_21

Download citation

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation