The shocking truth behind historical anatomical art

“People see anatomical illustration as an objective depiction of the human body to the best of an artist’s ability, something the exhibition seeks to ‘deconstruct,’” Gunn says. “In fact, they are as subject to culture, tastes, and artistic movements as any other form of art and drawing.” The anonymous black figure in Maclise’s book, believed to be the only black body in anatomical works of the period, is a case in point, removed from the print created for pre-abolitionist America.

In her 2021 article, “Black Apollo: Aesthetics, Anatomy, and Race in Joseph Macliese’s Surgical Anatomy,” Keren Rosa Hammerschlag notes that it is “noticeably aesthetic, which puts it in dialogue with classical statues such as the Apollo Belvedere, the ‘thin’ artistic production of Daniel Macliese, Joseph’s brother, images of black boxers, and abolitionist photographs from the period.”

Photography by Mark Newton

Within a decade of Macliese’s publication, Henry Gray’s famous Gray’s Anatomy, illustrated by Henry Vandyke Carter, put an affordable resource into the hands of medical students, yet it was also indebted to unclaimed bodies from workhouses and infirmaries. “There is a silence at Grey’s Centre, as indeed in all anatomy books, which concerns the indescribable,” Ruth Richardson wrote in her book The Making of Mr. Gray’s Anatomy. “As mass-produced images, [the bodies of these people] “It has entered the brains of generations of living people… and they have no memory except in pictures of Carter.”

Voiceless victims continued to be used to advance medical science into the twentieth century. For example, some surgeons still use Eduard Bernkopf’s Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy (1937), which shows prisoners of war dissected by Nazi doctors working under Hitler’s regime.