[Narrator] The interior of our bodies is hidden to us. What happens beneath the skin is mysterious,
fearful, amazing. In antiquity, the body's internal structure was the subject of speculation,
fantasy and some study but there were few efforts to represent it in pictures. The invention of the
printing press in the 15th century and the cascade of print technologies that followed
helped to inspire a new spectacular science of anatomy and new spectacular visions of the body.
Anatomical imagery proliferated, detailed and informative but also whimsical, surreal beautiful
and grotesque a dream anatomy that reveals as much about the outer world as it does the inner self.
Over the centuries anatomy has become a visual vocabulary of realism.
We regard the anatomical body as our inner reality;
a medium through which we imagine society, culture and the human condition. Drawn principally
from the collections of the National Library of Medicine, Dream Anatomy shows off the anatomical
imagination in some of its most astonishing incarnations, from 1500 to the present.
With the founding of the first medical schools in medieval Europe,
anatomy ascended to a prominent position in the medical curriculum.
Human dissection was performed as a ritual that illustrated the treatises of revered
ancient authors and that dramatized the power and knowledge of the medical profession.
The cutting open of the body was not a scientific study of the cadaver
but a performance designed to illustrate the anatomical treatises of Galen, the great anatomist
of antiquity. [Sappol] Galen was an iconic figure for people in the middle ages. He represented
the sum of learned authority on the human body. [Narrator] But the old anatomies
were primarily based on the dissection of animals and filled with numerous errors.
The mid 15th century invention of the printing press and the rise of a new spirit of critical
inquiry, associated with the renaissance, inspired a scientific revolution in anatomy.
Anatomists began to dissect in order to investigate the structure of the body
and produced texts illustrated with images based on their dissections.
Published in 1543, the Humani Corporis Fabrica by Andreas Vesalius
was the founding text of modern anatomy. The Fabrica set a new standard for accuracy
and a new standard for the artistry of scientific illustration. [Sappol] It's part
of a larger intellectual movement in society in which people are rethinking ancient wisdom
and creating new wisdom and it's not enough though to make a direct empirical observation
of the body and criticize the ancient text. Vesalius also says we have to make new texts
and these new texts, Vesalius argues, cannot just be written descriptions of the human body
they need to be illustrated texts and they have to show something of what the anatomist sees
and that is the Vesalian revolution in anatomy and it created the modern science of anatomy.
[Narrator] In the early modern era, 1450 to 1750, the boundary between art and science
was ill-defined. Anatomists and their artist collaborators made use of familiar modes of
representation, the iconography of landscape, nudity, mythology and christianity. Artists tried
to create illustrations that were accurate but also amazing, beautiful and entertaining. [Sappol]
In the early modern period science meant any organized body of knowledge so you could have
the science of theology or the science of law. Art meant any work from the human hand that involved
skill. People often talked about the art of dissection or the art of medicine.
The presumption is that a successful scientific illustration would also have to be an artful
illustration.
Between 1680 and 1800, anatomists began purging imaginative elements from scientific illustration.
The truth value of anatomy, they argued, was compromised by visual metaphors,
fantastic landscapes and comic poses. Ultimately, two styles of anatomical realism emerged,
one aimed to show the reality of dissection, the cutting open of a particular body with all the
prosthetics furniture and setting of dissection and the ugliness of anatomical mutilation.
The other aimed to show a higher reality, displaying beautified, cleaned up,
idealized bodies and body parts that float in air with no reference to any one dissection.
As old print technologies were perfected and new ones invented, anatomical illustration began to
achieve greater technical precision and a brilliant and dreamlike hyper aestheticism
that showed off with great artistry a more sophisticated knowledge and heightened perception
of the boundaries and surfaces of the body. [Sappol] The competition among anatomists for the
most elaborate printed anatomical atlases means that they're searching for the best printers,
the best engravers; the best artists that they can get at the same time there's a competition
among printers for patronage and the anatomical illustration for them becomes an exemplary work
it helps foster the development of improved technology so there's a synergistic effect.
[Narrator]
By 1800 anatomy had been defined as a science, the investigation of the real, rather than an art.
Anatomy could no longer tolerate humor fancy and ornament yet fantastic images of the anatomical
body continued to proliferate. Cast out of medical illustration, imaginative anatomy found
new homes in academic art where anatomy was an important part of the curriculum,
in popular health where the need to appeal to the public and a free hand
inspired the creation of vivid playful and eccentric images and in political cartoons,
film and fiction. Wherever anatomical images could be made to serve. [Sappol] In our society,
anatomy is seen as an authoritative source for views of the body, renderings of the body. We have
faith in anatomical imaging that that expresses the reality of who we are and that's
a resource for artists who also want to in a different way convey the reality of the
human body and the reality of human existence. [Narrator] Photography, radiography, digital
imaging and computer modeling have multiplied the possibilities for manipulation and play.
Artists and scientists are again exploring and re-imagining the body and investigating the
boundaries between their respective disciplines. We continue to dream the anatomical body.