2007/07/01 by Nick Hopwood · 1 citation
Medicine · Arts and Humanities · #Historical and Scientific Studies #Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis #History of Medicine Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1017/s0025727300000144
The uses of anatomical models in medical teaching changed dramatically during the nineteenth century. The most celebrated Enlightenment ceroplastics, the royal collections directed by the natural philosopher Felice Fontana in Florence and copied for the militarymedical academy in Vienna, united science and art in three-dimensional encyclopaedias of the body. According to Fontana, one could learn more from the models in six months than from dissecting scarce human cadavers in six years. But he gave up wax for wood, and by the early nineteenth century anatomists routinely disparaged his collections as white elephants. Beauty and truth no longer went hand in hand. As anatomy broke up into specialized research programmes, works intended also for the public were criticized as aristocratic luxuries and vulgar entertainments. Above all, medicine's rising authority was grounded in direct engagement with bodies, dead and alive. So when professors no longer had to rely on criminal corpses, but gained access to those of the poor, models were marginalized before they could seriously challenge dissection. They kept important roles in obstetrics, and gained new ones in specialties where objects were especially complex, rare, transient, hard-to-preserve and/or tiny, notably in pathology, dermatology and embryology. But wax, plaster, wood and papier mche were uncomfortably as well as strategically placed between prepared body parts, with their stronger claim to authenticity, and drawings, which were more established and easily reproduced. By the end of the century models of normal adult anatomy, now mostly commercially made, were more widely used in medical education than ever before, but for special purposes only.