Anatomical accuracy was a feature of many anatomical models produced, especially in Italy, during the 18th and 19th centuries.
The study of Anatomy in the 17th and 18th centuries:
The study of anatomy flourished in the 17th and 18th centuries. At the beginning of the 17th century, the use of dissecting human cadavers influenced anatomy, leading to a spike in the study of anatomy. The advent of the printing press facilitated the exchange of ideas. Because the study of anatomy concerned observation and drawings, the popularity of the anatomist was equal to the quality of his drawing talents, and one need not be an expert in Latin to take part. Many famous artists studied anatomy, attended dissections, and published drawings for money, from Michelangelo to Rembrandt. For the first time, prominent universities could teach something about anatomy through drawings, rather than relying on knowledge of Latin. Contrary to popular belief, the Church neither objected to nor obstructed anatomical research.
Only certified anatomists were allowed to perform dissections, and sometimes then only yearly. These dissections were sponsored by the city councilors and often charged an admission fee, rather like a circus act for scholars. Many European cities, such as Amsterdam, London, Copenhagen, Padua, and Paris, all had Royal anatomists (or some such office) tied to local government. Indeed, Nicolaes Tulp was Mayor of Amsterdam for three terms. Though it was a risky business to perform dissections, and unpredictable depending on the availability of fresh bodies, attending dissections was legal.
The supply of printed anatomy books from Italy and France led to an increased demand for human cadavers for dissections. Since few bodies were voluntarily donated for dissection, royal charters were established which allowed prominent universities to use the bodies of hung criminals for dissections. However, there was still a shortage of bodies that could not accommodate for the high demand of bodies. Until the middle of the 18th century, there was a quota of ten cadavers for each the Royal College of Physicians and the Company of Barber Surgeons, the only two groups permitted to perform dissections. During the first half of the 18th century, William Cheselden challenged the Company of Barber Surgeon's exclusive rights on dissections. He was the first to hold regular anatomy lectures and demonstrations. He also wrote The Anatomy of the Humane Body, a student handbook of anatomy. In 1752, the rapid growth of medical schools in England and the pressing demand for cadavers led to the passage of the Murder Act. This allowed medical schools in England to legally dissect bodies of executed murderers for anatomical education and research and also aimed to prevent murder. To further increase the supply of cadavers, the government increased the number of crimes in which hanging was a punishment. Although the number of cadavers increased, it was still not enough to meet the demand of anatomical and medical training.
Since few bodies were voluntarily donated for dissection, criminals that were hung for murder were dissected. However, there was a shortage of bodies that could not accommodate the high demand of bodies. To cope with shortages of cadavers and the rise in medical students during the 17th and 18th centuries, body-snatching and even anatomy murder were practiced to obtain cadavers. 'Body snatching' was the act of sneaking into a graveyard, digging up a corpse and using it for study. Men known as 'resurrectionists' emerged as outside parties, who would steal corpses for a living and sell the bodies to anatomy schools. The leading London anatomist John Hunter paid for a regular supply of corpses for his anatomy school.
During the 17th and 18th centuries, the perception of dissections had evolved into a form of capital punishment. Dissections were considered a dishonor. The corpse was mutilated and not suitable for a funeral. By the end of the 18th century, many European countries had passed legislation similar to the Murder Act in England to meet the demand of fresh cadavers and to reduce crime. Countries allowed institutions to use unclaimed bodies of paupers, prison inmates, and people in psychiatric and charitable hospitals for dissection. Unfortunately, the lack of bodies available for dissection and the controversial air that surrounded anatomy in the late 17th century and early 18th century caused a halt in progress that is evident by the lack of updates made to anatomical texts of the time between editions. Additionally, most of the investigations into anatomy were aimed at developing the knowledge of physiology and surgery. Naturally this meant that a close examination of the more detailed aspects of anatomy that could advance anatomical knowledge was not a priority.
Paris Medicine was notorious for its influence on medical thought and its contributions to medical knowledge. The new hospital medicine in France during the late 18th century was brought about in part by the Law of 1794 which made physicians and surgeons equals in the world of medical care. The law came as a response to the increase demand for medical professionals capable of caring for the increase in injuries and diseases brought about by French Revolution. The law also supplemented schools with bodies for anatomical lessons. Ultimately this created the opportunity for the field of medicine to grow in the direction of "localism of pathological anatomy, the development of appropriate diagnostic techniques, and the numerical approach to disease and therapeutics."
The British Parliament passed the Anatomy Act 1832, which finally provided for an adequate and legitimate supply of corpses by allowing legal dissection of executed murderers. The view of anatomist at the time, however, became similar to that of an executioner. Having one's body dissected was seen as a punishment worse than death, "if you stole a pig, you were hung. If you killed a man, you were hung and then dissected." Demand grew so great that some anatomist resorted to dissecting their own family members as well as robbing bodies from their graves.
Many Europeans interested in the study of anatomy traveled to Italy, then the centre of anatomy. Only in Italy could certain important research methods be used, such as dissections on women. Realdo Colombo (also known as Realdus Columbus) and Gabriele Falloppio were pupils of Vesalius. Columbus, as Vesalius's immediate successor in Padua, and afterwards professor at Rome, distinguished himself by describing the shape and cavities of the heart, the structure of the pulmonary artery and aorta and their valves, and tracing the course of the blood from the right to the left side of the heart.
The rise in anatomy lead to various discoveries and findings. In 1628, English physician William Harvey observed circulating blood through dissections of his father's and sister's bodies.
He published De moto cordis et sanguinis, a treatise in which he explained his theory.
In addition, during the 17th century, Galileo Galilei introduced the experimental method to scientific research. This led to innovation and change in anatomy. In Tuscany and Florence, Marcello Malpighi founded microscopic anatomy, and Nils Steensen studied the anatomy of lymph nodes and salivary glands.
By the end of the 17th century, Gaetano Zumbo developed anatomical wax modeling techniques. Antonio Valsalva, a student of Malpighi and a professor of anatomy at University of Bologna, was one of the greatest anatomists of the time. He is known by many as the founder of anatomy and physiology of the ear. In the 18th century, Giovanni Batista Morgagni related pre-mortem symptoms with post-mortem pathological findings using pathological anatomy in his book De Sedibus. This led to the rise of morbid anatomy in France and Europe. The rise of morbid anatomy was one of the contributing factors to the shift in power between doctors and physicians, giving power to the physicians over patients. With the invention of the Stethoscope in 1816, R.T.H. Laennec was able to help bridge the gap between a symptomatic approach to medicine and disease, to one based on anatomy and physiology. His disease and treatments were based on "pathological anatomy" and because this approach to disease was rooted in anatomy instead of symptoms, the process of evaluation and treatment were also forced to evolve. From the late 18th century to the early 19th century, the work of professionals such as Giambattista Morgagni, Scott Matthew Baillie, and Xavier Bichat served to demonstrate exactly how the detailed anatomical inspection of organs could lead to a more empirical means of understanding disease and health that would combine medical theory with medical practice. This "pathological anatomy" paved the way for "clinical pathology that applied the knowledge of opening up corpses and quantifying illnesses to treatments."
Along with the popularity of anatomy and dissection came an increasing interest in the preservation of dissected specimens. In the 17th century, many of the anatomical specimens were dried and stored in cabinets. In the Netherlands, there were attempts to replicate Egyptian mummies by preserving soft tissue. This became known as Balsaming. In the 1660s the Dutch were also attempting to preserve organs by injecting wax to keep the organ's shape. Dyes and mercury were added to the wax to better differentiate and see various anatomical structures for academic and research anatomy. By the late 18th century, Thomas Pole published The Anatomic Instructor, which detailed how to dry and preserve specimens and soft tissue.
Supine in her windowed coffin, she appears not only real, but alive. A chain of pearls rings her neck. Real human hair snakes across her glossy flesh. But peel back her wax breastplate, and new layers come into focus. There is her heart. Her pancreas. Her liver. Across her sculpted organs, silk or linen fibers serve as nerves and fine blood vessels. And finally, nestled like a pristine puzzle piece, a tiny unborn fetus curls in eternal repose.
Created between 1780 and 1782 in the workshop of master ceroplastician (or wax artist) Clemente Susini and his director Felice Fontana, the so-called “Anatomical Venus” defies easy categorization. To her patrons, her value was equal parts educational and artistic. Commissioned by then-Grand Duke of Tuscany Leopold II as the centerpiece of Florence’s first public science museum—the Museum for Physics and Natural History, widely known as La Specola—she was intended both to instruct the general public and render human dissection obsolete. As Fontana himself later noted, “If we succeeded in reproducing in wax all the marvels of our animal machine, we would no longer need to conduct dissections, and students, physicians, surgeons, and artists would be able to find their desired models in a permanent, odor-free, and incorruptible state.”
So groundbreaking was the Anatomical Venus’s internal design that some of her bodily structures were still unnamed at the time of their making. Yet she was more than a teaching tool for the masses. At a time when emulating the idealized human form was the ultimate mark of an artist, her verisimilitude was peerless. After three centuries of Medici rule in Florence—a regime defined by its artistic and financial decadence—the coronation of the Enlightenment-minded Leopold II marked the beginning of a new era in which masterpieces should be as scientifically instructive as they were aesthetically beautiful. With her seven removable, or “demountable,” layers, the Anatomical Venus was just that: a perfect synthesis of Enlightenment inquiry and Florentine artistry.
Although life-sized anatomical wax figures had begun cropping up in Paris and Bologna in the early 18th century, the Anatomical Venus was engineered to be the genre-defining exemplar of what would later become known as “Slashed Beauties” or “Dissected Graces.” Under the tenure of Fontana and Susini, these waxen women (and the very occasional man) would be frozen in various stages of dissection, each illustrating a different bodily system in a way that was readily comprehensible to even the most unschooled viewer. Of the more than 2,500 wax models produced by Fontana’s workshop between 1771 and 1893, approximately 1,400 pieces can still be found at La Specola. Eighteen are whole, life-sized figures—yet only the Anatomical Venus is fully demountable.
To modern sensibilities, the dissonance between the idealized sensuality of Susini’s work and its role as a medical and educational tool is visceral, even macabre. But according to Joanna Ebenstein, author of The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death & the Ecstatic (2016), this tension results from today’s urge to draw clear, strict lines between science and art, reason and spirituality. “Science does not simply uncover truth, it is also a culturally constructed, normative activity that reflects the ideals of its time,” writes Ebenstein. “Only a little over two hundred years ago [the Anatomical Venus] was the perfect tool to teach human anatomy to the public; today she is bizarre—an alluring, life-like female wax model in a state of ambiguous ecstasy with her inner organs on graphic display.”
One way to understand this dramatic shift in public perspective is to look at the changing role of the artist in society. Even before the birth of the Anatomical Venus, many leading artists were professional anatomists in their own right. Leonardo da Vinci is known to have based his sketches on real cadavers, ultimately dissecting more than 100 bodies in his lifetime. His contemporary, Michelangelo Buonarroti, is said to have accepted a commission for Florence’s Church of the Holy Ghost in exchange for a payment in cadavers.
In the case of Michelangelo, the involvement of church authorities was also no aberration. Like art and anatomy, science and religion were often understood as a complementary rather than contradictory means of understanding the world. In 1742, Pope Benedict XIV—better known as the “Enlightenment Pope”—founded the world’s first wax anatomical museum in Bologna, a precursor to Susini and Fontana’s workshop in Florence. So committed was the pope to wedding scientific and ecclesiastical practices that he required alleged miracles to be confirmed using scientific methodology. Later, he went so far as to exhort his flock to donate their kin, “dead by whatever means,” for dissection.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, many anatomists of the time understood and practiced their craft as an expression of religious devotion. As Ebenstein writes, the Anatomical Venus was created at a moment in which “the human being…was understood to be the pinnacle of God’s creation and a microcosm of the universe; to know the human body was, in a sense, to know the world and the mind of God.”
This principle was not lost on the Anatomical Venus’s many visitors. By the time of the figure’s public unveiling, Florence had already become an essential destination for tourists on the Italian leg of the Grand Tour; they flocked to see Sandro Botticelli
’s Birth of Venus (c. 1486) in the Medici country villa and Titian’s Venus of Urbino (1538) in the Uffizi Gallery. In this context, it is clear that Leopold II chose to contribute his very own Venus as a way of adding La Specola to the city’s list of must-see sites.
As with the city’s other iconic masterpieces, many tourists recounted feeling a kind of mystical reverence when confronted with the Anatomical Venus’s ecstatic gaze. “It is not possible to contemplate the structure of the human body without feeling convinced of some divine power,” wrote Élisabeth Louise Vigée-Le Brun, official portraitist of Marie Antoinette, after viewing the Anatomical Venus in 1792. “Despite what a few miserable philosophers have dared to say, in M. Fontana’s laboratory one kneels and believes.”
Today, the Anatomical Venus has no shortage of acolytes who make the pilgrimage to La Specola—an eclectic mix of artists, academics, and connoisseurs of the uncanny. Despite the diversity of these visitors’ interests, however, the most essential impact of the Venus remains the same. “Perhaps the draw of the Anatomical Venus comes from an unspoken, intuited resolution of our own divided nature,” Ebenstein writes. “An unconscious recognition of another avenue abandoned, in which beauty and science, religion and medicine, soul and body, might be one.” Ian Shank
The "supine" woman
The Venus of Urbino
supine
1.
(of a person) lying face upwards.
synonyms: flat on one's back, prone, recumbent, prostrate, stretched out, spreadeagled; lying, sprawling, horizontal, flat as a pancake
"she lay supine on the fine white sand"
antonyms: erect, vertical
technical: having the front or ventral part upwards. (of the hand) with the palm upwards.
2.
failing to act or protest as a result of moral weakness or indolence.
"the government was supine in the face of racial injustice"synonyms: weak, spineless, yielding, enervated, effete; docile, acquiescent, pliant, submissive, servile, inactive, passive, inert, spiritless, apathetic, indifferent "a supine and cowardly press has allowed itself to be intimidated into censoring the truth"
Objectification of the body and the Mind-Body split?
In Paris, following the French Revolution and the growing secularisation of society, the way was opened for alternative, scientific explanations for disease. ‘Medical’ labels and ‘scientific’ explanations could be used to understand the origins of disease and their potential cures.
Modern knowledge?The French Revolution allowed individuals to question the basis of everything, not just political structures but every part of life. And it put in power the men who could apply that to medicine. The chemist Antoine Fourcroy announced to France's new law-making body, the Convention in 1794 how medicine would be taught: "Little reading, much seeing and much doing will be the foundation of the new teaching which your committee proposes.
"Practising the art, observing at the bedside, all that was missing, will now be the principal part of instruction."
And Paris, with its dense population was an ideal place for the advances to take place. The hospitals of Paris were the great sheltering places for the poor, homeless and sick. They turned them into exclusively medical institutions, and used the thousands of poor people in them as their guinea-pigs.
Doctors carefully watched the course of their patients' diseases. Jean-Nicolas Corvisart was able to detect aneurysms in arteries. As well as observing and recording visible symptoms they carried out manual examinations, along with newer techniques.
At the hospital of La Charité, the physician Jean-Nicolas Corvisart pioneered tapping on the chest to analyse heart disease. One of his pupils, Théophile Laennec invented the stethoscope and was able to diagnose consumption.
He said: "I began to suspect that the phenomenon could be due to cavities in the lungs produced by the softening of the tubercules.
"As most of the patients who presented this phenomenon died at the hospital, I was able to confirm at autopsy that my suspicion was correct."
The widespread use of post mortems allowed the scientific classification of disease for the first time. Along with the symptoms, the doctors were able to see what had been going on inside bodies during the course of the illness.
They also created laboratories, as the physicists and chemists had done, and in them they tested and tortured nature to try to work out how animal and human bodies work and how and why they malfunction, sacrificing millions of animals to this cause.
This drive to uncover the specific aetiology of a disease by examining the human body is exemplified in the desire to explore the bodies of the dead as well as the living. The search for knowledge about the body encouraged early medical practitioners to act unlawfully by taking possession of cadavers pro-cured illicitly. This illegal trade thrived despite the fact that practitioners already enjoyed access to the bodies of the poor and destitute who had died in workhouses and other institutions.
The Enlightenment underpinned the development of specific methods of investigation in relation to medicine, namely scientific methods. The superiority of scientific thought was said to lie in the fact that evidence and theories were derived not from belief but from observation, and were confirmed through a process of experimentation. Evidence developed in this way was seen as unbiased, rational and purely descriptive of the natural world. Scientific facts could not be disputed except by employing the same methods to question or disprove an assertion.
This new conceptualisation of the body stemmed from a number of developments, some of which have been mentioned in the discussion above. For example, the Enlightenment gave rise to the dominance of scientific and rational thought, an essential element of which was the opportunity to see the physical body as part of the ‘natural’ world. Part of this way of conceptualising the body is based on the idea of the mind–body split, enabling us to perceive the body as a physical object outside, external to and separate from ourselves as represented by the mind.
The ability to conceive of the body as an object in part stemmed from the increasing trend towards its physical dissection. The corpse became the source of knowledge about the body and that knowledge was the domain of medical science. The concept of the clinical gaze was used by Foucault (1973) to describe a specific and distinct method of examination and understanding, made possible by the physical examination of the internal workings of the body. Foucault’s analysis contains the possibility of extending our knowledge of the socially constructed nature of reality. What may appear to us as real – for example, the physical make-up of the body – is actually the outcome of a specific kind of knowledge. To interpret the body and its workings requires a ‘guide’ because the body and its functions are not self-evident. Our representations of the body, whether through models or through diagrams, are the product of how we understand it. Without some training in what to look for and some general acceptance of the functions of the different parts of the anatomy, it is argued, we would not be able to interpret what we see.
But don't you believe them!The Age of Enlightenment + misogyny + patriarchy + the clinical gaze = the way it is!
The Pornographic Anatomy Book? The Curious Tale of The Anatomical Basis of Medical Practice
In 1971, three medical professors at the Duke University School of Medicine collaborated on The Anatomical Basis of Medical Practice, an anatomy textbook that included cheeky prose, some macho dudes, and more nubile female nudes who'd fit right in pin-up magazines.
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