AllenShotwell (3)

RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 1988

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Royal Academy of Surgery of Paris, history of medicine, history of surgery, scientific illustration, art in science, scientific drawings.

Electronic British Library Journal, 2018

While Bartholomaeus Anglicus’s De proprietatibus rerum—a popular medieval encylcopaedia describing the properties of ‘things’—has attracted the attention of scholars for centuries, far less well-known is the British Library’s unique copy in the Mantuan dialect. This manuscript, Additional MS 8785, was translated by Vivaldo Belcalzer, an educated councilman of Mantua, for the city’s signore, Guido Bonacolsi, in the first decade of the fourteenth century. The manuscript is evidently the original that was presented to Guido and includes an extensive, carefully executed decorative programme. This essay focuses on the rare depictions of human organs in the initials of Book Five, On the Parts of the Body, examined here for the first time and compared to contemporary examples of similar imagery. Drawn at the turning point between traditional reliance on authoritative texts and a new appetite for scientific human dissection (first undertaken in Bologna in approximately 1315), this article seeks to situate these remarkable and unique images within the broader context of medieval anatomical illustration at a significant moment in the history of medicine.

The study of anatomy reached the 14th century bridled with all the same assumptions and techniques indicated by the classical world and continued to follow the traces linked to the philosophical knowledge of the human body, rather than speculative requirements. The dissections carried out on dead bodies therefore only served to support what had already been written by the classical authors. Mondino’s Anatomy does just this, though it appears to be ready to accept first-hand knowledge. Its nonlinear path did not depend so much on the aversion of the Church, which so hindered and restricted its path, as on as the relationship between society and the corpse. The quest for observation and experimentation that began to stir the minds of many doctors, students and artists in as early as the 14th century, clashed with the general reluctance and horror of handling a body. An ancestral, anthropological problem of life and death that curbed this form of practice and forced ‘researchers’ (whether doctors or artists) to hide away and carry out secret dissections in the crypts of churches or in private houses. The dead bodies to be dissected were chosen mainly from among people who had been executed, and the limited numbers of the yearly dissections, the fact that they were carried out mainly during Carnival or Lent, because of their innate moral and religious significance, are elements that confirm that anatomy was considered a reprehensible act that could only be done under certain ethical and moral conditions or with certain personalities and facilities. The Vesalian revolution revolved around these strongly rooted assumptions. Accordingly, the anatomist was not only ‘bound’ to verify, by directly empirical observation, the cognitive tools that, until then, were in his possession, but also to promote practical teaching exercises. This not only introduced a specialisation in this subject, but also a better handling and familiarity with the body and was to lead to the scientific advances of the following century.

1988

The book, the body, the scalpel Six engraved title pages for anatomical treatises of the first half of the sixteenth century ANDREA CARUNO The purpose of this essay is to show the changing status of the anatomist and his work during the late fifteenth and the early sixteenth century through an examination of five title pages that depict anatomy lessons as well as other aspects of the relationship between the physician and the body and, therefore, of the relationship between theory and practice in Renaissance anatomy. These title pages show the actors and some of the circumstances of the staging of public dissection. Each frontispiece tells a story and gives some clues to what the representation implies. I will concentrate on what the frontispiece (its author, as well as its patron) aims to show; rather than the connection to actual practice or the truthfulness of the representation. From this point of view, the public image of themselves which physicians attempt to present is much more meaningful than the reality. The first didactic manual to deal with the technical details of the practice of anatomy in its entirety was the Anatom?a of Mundinus da Luzzi, which first appeared in Bologna in 1316. This work described what was already known, without venturing on any research that might have questioned traditional anatomical knowledge. It is evident that Mundinus followed closely the De loci s affectibus and the De juvamends of Galen, while making occasional references to the works of Avicenna. Yet the descriptions contained in the text are clearly based on the direct observation of corpses; for the first time since the Greeks and the Arabs, there was a mise-en-texte of anatomy as it was and as it should be practiced. After the corpse was laid on the anatomical table, a complete dissection was carried out over a period of four days, starting from the abdomen, then moving up to the chest and the head and ending with the limbs. The first documented dissection of a human body took place at the University of Padua in 1341. Many others were performed throughout Northern Italy during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Apparently, they all served the same merely illustrative purpose as the Anatom?a of Mundinus, which was probably the written guide for all these dissections. Research on and within the human body was not the aim; instead, the practice of dissection was intended to confirm the classic account, particularly that of Galen.

2022

This thesis’ purpose is to provide an introduction to the history of medical culture in early modern Europe, focusing on the birth and development of the anatomical theaters. Particularly, attention will be paid on the first two to have ever been built, which are the anatomical theaters of Padua, in Italy (1595), and of Leiden, in the Netherlands (1597). The foundation of permanent theaters of anatomy is indeed only the arrival point of a long development of anatomical teaching which already started during the 14th century, when the first temporary locus anatomicus started being built and used by university professors. They are the symbol of the triumph of the demonstrative method, which sees the professor actively dissecting a body, over the traditional way of teaching anatomy, based on the passive study of classical books and manuals. The public dissections that started taking place yearly embraced humanist thoughts and ideals, and in particular the belief that knowledge of Man would lead to understanding the whole creation and, eventually, of God. Anatomical dissections were indeed accomplishing both a profane ritual, valorizing the scientific discoveries, and a sacred one, where mankind, obsessed with death, respected the divine image of the human body. Attention will be chiefly aimed on Italian and Dutch universities’ different approach to medicine, dealing with the foundation as well as the public anatomy and regulations of each anatomy theater.

RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics, 1995

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

postmedieval, 2017

Anatomy -- the practice of stripping back the body and revealing it, part by part, for discussion and debate -- is a process much explored by the medical humanities, and it presents rich intellectual and practical potential for medieval studies. Tracing anatomical tendencies in the actions of both modern practitioners and inhabitants of the medieval past, this article advocates for anatomy’s addition to the rostra of bodily discourses at the disposal of historians of medieval culture. Posited as a critical framework in its own right, notions of anatomy, autopsy, and a literal bodily reading offer us new ways of opening up medieval studies today in much the same way as medieval bodies were once opened on the slab.

History of Science, 2018

Based on the newly discovered, extensive manuscript notes of a virtually unknown German medical student by the name of Johann Konrad Zinn, who studied in Padua from 1593 to 1595, this paper offers a detailed account of what medical students could expect to learn about anatomy in late sixteenth-century Padua. It highlights the large number and wide range of anatomical demonstrations, most of which were private anatomies for a small circle of students and do not figure in Acta of the German Nation, the principal source historians have so far relied upon. While the large audience in the big, celebrated public anatomies made it difficult if not impossible for the students to see the details of the anatomical structures, the much more numerous private anatomies offered a view from close up. As Zinn’s notes show, the two leading Paduan anatomists, Hieronymus Fabricius Aquapendente and Giulio Casseri often focused on a specific part of the body, like the brain or the pregnant uterus, and, ...

2011

Anatomy was crucial for the formation of modern cultural concepts of the body during the early modern period. In a process from the Renaissance to the turn of the nineteenth century, cosmological concepts of the body were secularized and gradually replaced by notions of the body as an object of modern medicine and science. This thesis argues that the visual representation of the anatomical body played a key role in this transformation. Until the end of the seventeenth century the iconography of anatomy legitimized the dissection of the body and portrayed the anatomist as an honourable, dignified and decent scholar. However, during the Enlightenment the moralizing visual language was gradually replaced by neo-classical aesthetics and art theory. Now technical skills and detailed knowledge became the defining features of the anatomist and the representations of the anatomical body. This thesis uses a wide range of visual sources and analyzes them in the longue duree. The material incl...