Political Anatomy of the Body: medical knowledge in Britain in the 20th century (original) (raw)
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2012
The journey of a corpse from a deathbed or gallows, sold to a body dealer or dug up by a resurrectionist, sold again to an anatomist, dissected and either reburied or preserved for centuries in a jar of fluid on a shelf is a fascinating one. The Enlightenment was a time when classical and medieval ideas based on theory and philosophical argument were being re-evaluated in the light of tangible evidence that could be observed with the senses. Anatomisation provided some of this direct evidence that helped change the way people of the 1700s viewed their place in the world. Comparative anatomy of humans and animals showed mankind how we were different to other warm-blooded animals. Museums were established to show the wonders of our design, and to compare normal anatomy with pathology that occurred with the design became corrupt. The purpose of these museums was to teach and educate, and also to display to the public the wonders of science and the expertise of that institution. Anatomy, pathology and display were interwoven during the Enlightenment in a manner that has persisted for three centuries, and forms the basis of anatomical education today.
Two Anatomies and Two Systems of Medical Knowledge: Dissection with or without Knife and Anatomist
Following confrontation between medicine and the rising knowledge of anatomy and dissection, it is wise to say, men needed a theory, for the phenomena that come under observation are so numerous that in default of a theory they would elude our grasp. Medicine must be guided by a theory, for otherwise medical doctrine could not be handed on from teacher to pupil. Anatomical knowledge, especially knowledge gained from dissecting a cadaver, was the “Midas touch” which ushered in a new era of medicine. It universalized ‘modern’ medicine and made it the only source of practical as well as theoretical knowledge of the body. All other medical knowledge (traditional and indigenous) was made subservient to it. The use of corpse as teaching and experimental material bears a close relationship to the use of the lived body. For the study of anatomy and of surgery, it is necessary for the practitioner to develop – even to cultivate – clinical detachment while work is in progress. In Indian context, it is better to say there was almost no anatomical practice at all. Hence, there was no question of the dead teaching the live. Consequently, “necessary inhumanity” is not the term suitable for this context. We do not even find any medical professionalism in European sense. Rather, Āyurveda constituted the matrix through which Indian subjectivity found its expression. The Āyurvedic assumption of the identity of body and nature is a logical consequence of the leitmotif of the Indian world view that asserts an underlying unity in the apparent multiformity of creation and strives for a transcendence of dualities, oppositions and contradictions. To de-essentialize this universalized epistemological and ontological preoccupations of “necessary inhumanity” we have to search for different epistemologies and corporeities. We find before us a corporeity which is marginalized as a consequence of the affirmation of new technologies. One has to emphasize that power-knowledge never succeeds in completely overcoming the body. The body always exceeds the power frame that attempts to control it.
Medical Knowledge and its ‚ Sitz im Leben ‘ : Body and Horror in Antiquity « »
2021
The notion of human dissection and especially vivisection was horrifying to the ancient Romans, even in a culture where mutilation and violent death were par for the course. Nevertheless, knowledge of the insides of the body held an intellectual fascination to doctors and laymen alike. Roman anatomists reconciled these two facts by practicing comparative anatomy, dissecting monkeys and other mammals as proxies for human structures. In fact, they performed both dissections and vivisections for public edification and entertainment. This paper interrogates the boundaries of this compromise and charts moments where dissectors veer to one direction or the other in their effort to find a balance between underscoring homologies and maintaining emotional distance.
Relocating Anatomy at the 3rd Level: Anatomical Knowledge, Body and Commodification of Body Parts
Introductory Remarks In the opening sentences of his celebrated book Sawday raises a few questions – where did these cognate terms like anatomy, dissection etc. originate, and how did the modern, ostensibly neutral scientific sense of " dissection or " anatomization " come to be the predominant meaning of the word? Seemingly, in an attempt to answer these questions, he makes it clear that the anatomist, then, " is the person who has reduced one in order to understand the morphology, and thus to preserve morphology at a later date, in other bodies, elsewhere. " 1 Etymologically speaking, we have a plethora of meanings of the word " anatomy ". It has undergone changes in meaning and connotations with the passage of time. A·nat·o·my (nat' me),n., pl. –mies. 1a. a philosophical activity and practice which sought to reveal the wonder and goodness of God's creation through dissection of the human body (c. 1250-1800). 1b. later reduced to a means of approaching and mastering the world through structure and function rather than purpose (c. 1650-1850). 2. the process by which a subject is rendered object. 3. the study of an object by its parts. 4. a contested site of knowledge for post-structuralism, feminism, cultural studies, queer studies, disability studies, and other postmodern disciplines eager to critique the modernist search for an underlying order to reality. 5. Informal. oversimplification that both benefits and harms the object of study: She allowed patriarchy's anatomy of the female body to determine her sense of identity. 6. public anatomies, name given to open demonstrations or lectures by anatomists, usually including vivisection of animals as well as dissection of the human body. [1350-1400; ME < L anatomia < Gk anatom(e) a cutting up (ana-ANA-+ tom-cut (var. of tem-) + –e n. suffix) + –ia –Y 3 ] 2 The present study of mine is from a medical professional's point of view, not from a historian's viewpoint. This particular position of doing research has yielded, to my opinion, a few interesting issues that can be taken up for further investigations by historians of science and medicine. There was descriptive anatomical knowledge in traditional medicine enshrouded by philosophical and religious orthodoxies and interventions which made it " holy " and " eternal ". The Western medical knowledge has however provided the knowledge of dissection and delving into the interiors of the body. The body was subjected to experimental verification. Rasmussen identifies one source in the concession of established Christian orthodoxy to permit dissection of the human body some five centuries ago. 3 Such a concession was in keeping with the Christian view of the body as a weak and imperfect vessel for the transfer of the soul from this world to the next. For in the eyes of the Church these had more to do with religion and the soul, and hence properly remained in its domain. This compact may be considered largely responsible for the anatomical and structural base upon which scientific Western medicine eventually was to be built. Moreover, at the same time, the basic principle of the science of the day, as enunciated by Galileo, Newton, and Descartes, was analytical, meaning that entities to be investigated be resolved into isolable causal chains or units, from which it was assumed that the whole could be understood, both materially and conceptually, by reconstituting the parts. With mind-body dualism firmly established under the imprimatur of the Church, classical science readily fostered
2011
The study of anatomy in England during the 18th and 19th century has become infamous for bodysnatching from graveyards to provide a sufficient supply of cadavers. However, recent discoveries have improved our understanding of how and why anatomy was studied during the enlightenment, and allow us to see the context in which dissection of the human body took place. Excavations of infirmary burial grounds and medical school cemeteries, study of hospital archives, and analysis of the content of surviving anatomical collections in medical museums enables us to re-evaluate the field from a fresh perspective. The pathway from a death in poverty, sale of the corpse to body dealer, dissection by anatomist or medical student, and either the disposal and burial of the remains or preservation of teaching specimens that survive today in medical museums is a complex and fascinating one.
The study of anatomy in England from 1700 to the early 20th century
Journal of …
The study of anatomy in England during the 18th and 19th century has become infamous for bodysnatching from graveyards to provide a sufficient supply of cadavers. However, recent discoveries have improved our understanding of how and why anatomy was studied during the enlightenment, and allow us to see the context in which dissection of the human body took place. Excavations of infirmary burial grounds and medical school cemeteries, study of hospital archives, and analysis of the content of surviving anatomical collections in medical museums enables us to re-evaluate the field from a fresh perspective. The pathway from a death in poverty, sale of the corpse to body dealer, dissection by anatomist or medical student, and either the disposal and burial of the remains or preservation of teaching specimens that survive today in medical museums is a complex and fascinating one.
Re-enchanting the body: overcoming the melancholy of anatomy
Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics, 2018
I argue here that Weberian disenchantment is manifest in the triumph of instrumental reason and the expansion of analytic enquiry, which now dominates not simply those sciences upon which medicine depends, but medical practice itself. I suggest ways that analytic enquiry, also referred to here as anatomical reasoning, are part of a particular ideology-a way of seeing, speaking about, and inhabiting the world-that often fails to serve the health of patients because it is incapable of "seeing" them in the moral sense described by Iris Murdoch and others. I use the work of James Elkins and Wendell Berry to call for the recovery of a way of seeing the human body as both other and more than an object of scientific enquiry and social control.
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.