The Illustrious Anatomist: Authorship, Patronage, and Illustrative Style in Anatomy Folios, 1700-1840

'The object of sense and experiment': the ontology of sensation in William Hunter's investigation of the human gravid uterus

William Hunter's anatomical inquiry employed all of his senses, but how did his personal experiences with the cadaver become generalized scientific knowledge teachable to students and understandable by fellow practitioners? Moving beyond a historiographical focus on Hunter's images and extending Lorraine Daston's (2008) concept of an 'ontology of scientific observation' to include non-visual senses, I argue that Hunter's work aimed to create a stabilized object of the cadaver that he and his students could perceive in common. Crucial to this stabilization was the sense of touch and its interaction with other senses, creating intersensory knowledge of the cadaver. Through a close reading of his neglected posthumous publication An Anatomical Description of the Human Gravid Uterus (1794), I demonstrate that Hunter wrote extensively about touch and other sensory experiences, using comparative metaphors and other linguistic strategies to engender clear ideas of the cadaver in the mind of the reader. That these ideas could be consistent between practitioners was guaranteed by God, but required practitioners to appropriately reflect on their sensory experiences with cadavers. Hunter's experimental practice encompassed both simple and complex methods, all aimed at increasing the range of sensorial experiences he had with the gravid uterus. His preservations of these experiences in text, image and preparation could then be used to support further anatomical investigations.

Displayed Wounds, Encrypted Messages: Hyper-Realism and Imagination in Medical Moulages

Moulages are three-dimensional colorful replicas of body parts with particular expressions of ailments. Historically, by operating a transition between illness and disease, moulages were a powerful tool in the consolidation of the medical specialty of dermatovenereology. Yet, moulages are not solely an objectification of biological processes suitable for medical teaching; they also activate non-medical cognitions and emotions about life, death, behavior, and morality that are rooted in the history of the art of wax modeling. Furthermore, they provide a window into a dense history of urban health and illness, sex, law enforcement, assistance, gender, class, and politics.