Malleable Anatomies

An account of the practice of anatomical modelling in mid-eighteenth-century Italy, showing how anatomical models became an authoritative source of medical knowledge, but also informed social, cultural, and political developments at the crossroads of medical learning, religious ritual, antiquarian and artistic cultures, and Grand Tour spectacle

Malleable Anatomies offers an account of the early stages of the practice of anatomical modelling in mid-eighteenth-century Italy. It investigates the 'mania' for anatomical displays that swept the Italian peninsula, and traces the fashioning of anatomical models as important social, cultural, and political as well as medical tools. Over the course of the eighteenth century, anatomical specimens offered particularly accurate insights into the inner body. Being coloured, soft, malleable, and often life-size, they promised to foster anatomical knowledge for different audiences in a delightful way. But how did anatomical models and preparations inscribe and mediate bodily knowledge? How did they change the way in which anatomical knowledge was created and communicated? And how did they affect the lives of those involved in their production, display, viewing, and handling? Examining the circumstances surrounding the creation and early viewing of anatomical displays in Bologna and Naples, Malleable Anatomies addresses these questions by reconstructing how anatomical modelling developed at the intersection of medical discourse, religious ritual, antiquarian and artistic cultures, and Grand Tour display. While doing so, it investigates the development of anatomical modelling in the context of the diverse worlds of visual and material practices that characterized the representation and display of the body in mid-eighteenth-century Italy. Drawing attention to the artisanal dimension of anatomical practice, and to the role of women as both makers and users of anatomical models, it considers how anatomical specimens lay at the centre of a composite world of social interactions, which led to the fashioning of modellers as anatomical celebrities. Moreover, it examines how anatomical displays transformed the proverbially gruesome practice of anatomy into an enthralling experience that engaged audiences' senses.

Nothing excited early modern anatomists more than touching a beating heart. In his 1543 treatise, Andreas Vesalius boasts that he was able to feel life itself through the membranes of a heart belonging to a man who had just been executed, a comment that appears near the woodcut of a person being dissected while still hanging from the gallows. In this highly original book, Rose Marie San Juan confronts the question of violence in the making of the early modern anatomical image. Engaging the ways in which power operated in early modern anatomical images in Europe and, to a lesser extent, its colonies, San Juan examines literal violence upon bodies in a range of civic, religious, pedagogical, and “exploratory” contexts. She then works through the question of how bodies were thought to be constituted—systemic or piecemeal, singular or collective—and how gender determines this question of constitution. In confronting the issue of violence in the making of the anatomical image, San Juan explores not only how violence transformed the body into a powerful and troubling double but also how this kind of body permeated attempts to produce knowledge about the world at large. Provocative and challenging, this book will be of significant interest to scholars across fields in early modern studies, including art history and visual culture, science, and medicine.

Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy: Contested Deliveries explores attempts by church, state, and medical authorities to regulate and professionalize the practice of midwifery in Italy from the late sixteenth to the late eighteenth century. Medical writers in this period devoted countless pages to investigating the secrets of women’s sexuality and the processes of generation. By the eighteenth century, male practitioners in Britain and France were even successfully advancing careers as male midwives. Yet, female midwives continued to manage the vast majority of all early modern births. An examination of developments in Italy, where male practitioners never made successful inroads into childbirth, brings into focus the complex social, religious, and political contexts that shaped the management of reproduction in early modern Europe. Authority, Gender, and Midwifery in Early Modern Italy argues that new institutional spaces to care for pregnant women and educate midwives in Italy during the eighteenth century were not strictly medical developments but rather socio-political responses both to long standing concerns about honor, shame, and illegitimacy, and contemporary unease about population growth and productivity. In so doing, this book complicates our understanding of such sites, situating them within a longer genealogy of institutional spaces in Italy aimed at regulating sexual morality and protecting female honor. It will be of interest to scholars of the history of medicine, religious history, social history, and Early Modern Italy.

Interdisciplinary and cross-cultural view on authority construction among early modern female intellectuals The complex relation between gender and the representation of intellectual authority has deep roots in European history. Portraits and Poses adopts a historical approach to shed new light on this topical subject. It addresses various modes and strategies by which learned women (authors, scientists, jurists, midwifes, painters, and others) sought to negotiate and legitimise their authority at the dawn of modern science in Early Modern and Enlightenment Europe (1600–1800). This volume explores the transnational dimensions of intellectual networks in France, Italy, Britain, the German states and the Low Countries, among others. Drawing on a wide range of case studies from different spheres of professionalisation, it examines both individual and collective constructions of female intellectual authority through word and image. In its innovative combination of an interdisciplinary and transnational approach, this volume contributes to the growing literature on women and intellectual authority in the Early Modern Era and outlines contours for future research.

Health and Architecture offers a uniquely global overview of the healthcare facility in the pre-modern era, engaging in a cross-cultural analysis of the architectural response to medical developments and the formation of specialized hospitals as an independent building typology. Whether constructed as part of Chinese palaces in the 15th century or the religious complexes in 16th century Ottoman Istanbul, the healthcare facility throughout history is a built environment intended to promote healing and caring. The essays in this volume address how the relationships between architectural forms associated with healthcare and other buildings in the pre-modern era, such as bathhouses, almshouses, schools and places of worship, reflect changing attitudes towards healing. They explore the impact of medical advances on the design of hospitals across various times and geographies, and examine the historic construction processes and the stylistic connections between places of care and other building types, and their development in urban context. Deploying new methodological, interdisciplinary and comparative approaches to the analysis of healthcare facilities, Health and Architecture demonstrates how the spaces of healthcare themselves offer some of the most powerful and practical articulations of therapy.

This volume addresses the interdependencies between visual technologies and epistemology with regard to our perception of the medical body. The contributions investigate medical bodies as historical, technological and political constructs, constituted where knowledge formation and visual cultures intersect.

In recent decades, researchers have studied the cultures of medicine and the ways in which context and identity shape both individual experiences and structural barriers in medical education. The essays in this collection offer new insights into the deep histories of these processes, across time and around the globe. Transforming Medical Education compiles twenty-one historical case studies that foreground processes of learning, teaching, and defining medical communities in educational contexts. The chapters are organized around the themes of knowledge transmission, social justice, identity, pedagogy, and the surprising affinities between medical and historical practice. By juxtaposing original research on diverse geographies and eras – from medieval Japan to twentieth-century Canada, and from colonial Cameroon to early Republican China – the volume disrupts traditional historiographies of medical education by making room for schools of medicine for revolutionaries, digital cadavers, emotional medical students, and the world’s first mandatory Indigenous community placement in an accredited medical curriculum. This unique collection of international scholarship honours historian, physician, and professor Jacalyn Duffin for her outstanding contributions to the history of medicine and medical education. An invaluable scholarly resource and teaching tool, Transforming Medical Education offers a provocative study of what it means to teach, learn, and belong in medicine.