The Great Dead Body Teachers: an adventure into the world of anatomy and dissection by Jackie Dent

Author:Jackie Dent [Jackie Dent]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Ultimo Press
Published: 2022-12-24T00:00:00+00:00

To look at the massive canon of anatomical art, which really starts to kick in around the 17th century, is to settle into a curious trinity: the dead person, the dissection itself and the way the artist has chosen to depict the scene. The dissected are rendered in all ways: butchered, magnificent, ugly, raw, fleshy, smooth, dead, alive and expressive.

Take Joseph Maclise, the 19th-century Irish anatomist, surgeon and medical artist, whose aortic arches I became unexpectedly fixated on. What is notable in his tome Surgical Anatomy, published in 1851, is how utterly gorgeous and somehow alive the dead young men on the page are. Even though anatomical hooks stretch open their armpits or there is a scalpel on the side of the sketch; they could still be pin-ups, their moody faces, Byronic curls, hands, penises, intestines and torsos so gorgeously rendered that medical historian Michael Sappol now posits that Maclise might possibly have been gay. ‘Maybe they were a space in which he unveiled himself, sent out flares of homoerotic desire,’ writes Sappol.

But while these men are stunning to look at, I also wish someone had picked up their bodies from the hospital or the asylum in which they died and given them a proper burial. How sad that it was only in death that these friendless, poor and sick men were transformed into Apollonian gods on the dissectors’ and lithographers’ slabs of stone. If only they’d felt that love when they were alive.

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