Systems of display: the making of anatomical knowledge in Enlightenment Britain

Abstract

Late eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century anatomy depended upon a variety of visual displays. Drawings in books, particularly expensive, beautiful and elaborately illustrated books that have been the objects of historians' fascination, were understood to function alongside chalk drawings done in classrooms, casual and formalized experience with animal and human corpses, text describing or contextualizing the images, and preserved specimens. This article argues that British anatomists of the late Enlightenment discovered and taught an intelligible, orderly Nature through comprehensive systems of display. These systems trained vision, and, taken as a whole, they can be used to understand a visual culture of science. Displays helped anatomists, artists and natural philosophers learn to see both the tiniest and the rarest of parts and an overall general plan of anatomy and relationship of parts. Each type of display was materially different from the others and each served to perfect human vision for a group of natural philosophers who valued sensory experience -primarily that of vision, but also that of touch -as the basis of learning. Together, these displays allowed the anatomist to see, in all of its dimensions, human nature, frozen in the ordered and unstressed state of fresh death, a comprehensible guide to life and its functions. A pedagogical context of use defined and bound such displays together as complementary parts of a unified project. A system of display stood in for Nature and at the same time represented her ordering by anatomists.

The doctor as an artist

“…Lombroso, 2 in his wellknown work ''The Men of Genius,'' written towards the end of the nineteenth century, argued that genius is a type of degeneration, and that creative ability is intensely linked with psychopathology, the latter being inherited for the most part. 3 Increased interest has recently led to several systematic studies, [4][5][6][7] in which a link between depression and…”

“…4 He stressed the importance of looking carefully and argued that as an anatomist, he could reproduce nature faithfully . 5 Bell commissioned other artists to illustrate his books namely Sir David Wilkie (1785–1841), who provided several of the drawings for his Essays on the Anatomy of Expression for Painting as did George Lethbridge Saunders (1807–1863) who drew the ‘laughing head’. 6 The book was written specifically for painters on the premise that ‘expression is to passion what language is to thought’.…”

‘The want of a proper Gardiner’: late Georgian Scottish botanic gardeners as intermediaries of medical and scientific knowledge

“…Berkowitz analyses the pedagogical use in anatomical study of a variety of three-dimensional models, sculptures and specimens, alongside images in books, paintings and classroom drawings, and actual bodies (both dead and alive). 119 She describes these media as interrelated tools that functioned together alongside texts 'to serve pedagogical and research functions, endeavours that often coalesced in a science that was rooted in the classroom'. 120 Clear parallels can be drawn with the use of botanic collections as tools for teaching and the associated illustrations, models and collections (such as herbaria) that were used in conjunction with botanical specimens brought in from the garden or the field.…”

Charles Bell’s seeing hand: Teaching anatomy to the senses in Britain, 1750–1840

“…His contribution, then, came in the elaboration and application to medical teaching of a pedagogical philosophy in which books served as secondary to objects and knowledge through books was developed first by description of experience and second by arrangement into a system of such descriptions. 42 It was a pedagogical philosophy that drew upon, synthesized, and expanded the work of others. The description Tannoch-Bland gives of Stewart as 'explicator of systems, an educator' 43 could as easily be applied to Bell.…”