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

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 September 2012

CARIN BERKOWITZ
CARIN BERKOWITZ*
Affiliation:
Chemical Heritage Foundation, 315 Chestnut St, Philadelphia, PA 19106, USA. Email: [email protected]
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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.

Type
Research Article
Information
The British Journal for the History of Science , Volume 46 , Issue 3 , September 2013 , pp. 359 - 387
Copyright
Copyright © British Society for the History of Science 2012 

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References

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36 ‘Hunter had many advantages over his rivals. He was a splendid lecturer. He had new anatomical discoveries to impart to his students, and owned better specimens preserved in spirits in glass cases’. Porter, op. cit. (14), p. 52.

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43 A present-day physiologist, Anne McNabb of Virginia Tech, who heard me talk about this system of displays, commented that when you open a human body, it quickly becomes a brown, stringy mess. To see its structure through dissection, ideally you would look at the cadaver right at the moment of death, when color was still present such that you could distinguish parts. But since British anatomists of the period had positioned themselves as antivivisectionists, preservations and models restored that ability to see order amidst a brown stringy mess by re-creating the colours of life, or fresh death, for British anatomists.

44 Hunter, op. cit. (1), 57.

45 Bell, op. cit. (25), p. 125.

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47 Bell Collection, BC.xii.2.M.57, GC 11006.

48 For one example, see the posthumously edited and published Hunter, Marshall and Teacher, op. cit. (42).

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52 Bell, op. cit. (2), p. 150 (10 June 1809).

53 Daston and Galison deploy such dichotomies widely in Objectivity. Their treatment depends on such oppositions as objectivity and subjectivity, representing and analysing, working objects and nature, truth and beauty, and representing and analysing.

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