“People perceive anatomical illustrations to be objective depictions of the human body to the best of the artist’s ability,” Gann says, and the exhibition aims to “deconstruct” that. “The fact is that they, like other forms of art and illustration, are influenced by culture, taste, and artistic movements.” The unnamed black figure in McCraith’s book, thought to be the only black body in an anatomical work of the time, and omitted from editions produced for pre-abolition America, is a case in point.
He is described by Keren Rosa Hammerschlag in a 2021 essay: Black Apollo: Aesthetics, Anatomy, and Race in Joseph McCraith’s Surgical Anatomy“It has been particularly beautified and placed in dialogue with classical statues such as Apollo Belvedere, the “high” artwork of Joseph’s brother Daniel MacLeese, paintings of black pugilists, and images of the abolitionist movement of the time. ”
Mark Newton PhotoWithin a decade of McCrise, Henry Gray’s famous Gray’s Anatomy, illustrated by Henry VanDyke Carter, finally put an affordable resource into the hands of medical students, but it was also dependent on unclaimed bodies from workhouses and clinics. “At the heart of Gray is silence; indeed, as in all anatomy books, it is concerned with the unspeakable,” writes Ruth Richardson. The Making of Mr. Grey’s Anatomy. “The image of a mass-produced model is [the bodies of these people] They have entered the brains of generations of living people…and they are memorialized in no other way than with Carter’s images. ”
The exploitation of voiceless victims for the advancement of medicine continued into the 20th century. For example, Eduard Pernkopf’s Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy (1937): Still used by some surgeons todayfeatures prisoners of war dissected by Nazi doctors working under Hitler’s regime.
Source: BBC Culture – www.bbc.com
