HF8175: The apotheosis of the dissected plate: spectacles of layering and transparency in the 19th and 20th century anatomy
2015, Length: 00:53:45, Color, Sound. This Beta SP was duplicated from a DVD
by BonoLabs for the National Library of Medicine, July 2015.
...
[Jeffrey S. Reznick, Ph.D.:] Today I have the distinct pleasure of introducing my colleague,
Dr. Michael Sappol, who is a historian here in the History of Medicine Division,
of the National Library of Medicine. Michael's scholarly work focuses
on the body and the history of anatomy and death, medical films,
medical illustration and medical exhibition. Dr. Sappol has curated many
exhibitions here and elsewhere, as many as well as many websites on the history of medicine,
and he's the author of several fantastic books. Most recently, of which he's editor of the Hidden
Treasure book well known here at the National Library of Medicine, published on the occasion
of its 175th anniversary. He's also author of a very well received
book entitled A Traffic of Dead Bodies, published in 2002, author also of Dream Anatomy,
published in 2006, and he's editor, of a cultural history of the human body in the age of Empire,
published in 2010. His current book project about which is going to touch today in
his presentation based on his work long standing work in NLM historical
collections as well as other major historical collections around the world.
The title of his presentation is, The apotheosis of the dissected plate,
spectacles of layering and transparency in 19th and 20th century anatomy. And this presentation,
as I mentioned, is part of his ongoing work for a book project entitled "How to Get
Modern with Scientific Illustration." I've had the privilege of talking
with Mike on a regular basis over the past several years about his research,
which is always a pleasure to do. And I'm excited about this
presentation and how Mike has been using our collections in such innovative and dynamic ways as he
always does in his long record of history of medicine scholarship, which is held in very high regard,
by me, by our colleagues here in the History of Medicine Division. And I will add,
by scholars around the world who look to Mike as an expert in his field.
And recently he's delivered a number of lectures over the past year in
Belgium and here in the United States. And and all of his work culminates
in this new book and we're really pleased to have him and thank you, Mike,
for offering this presentation.
[silence]
[Dr. Sappol:] Ohh thank you Jeff.
So, I should say that almost everything
you see up on the screen today is
kept in the collections of the National Library of Medicine. So most of it in the History
of Medicine Division, but actually some of it from the general collection as well.
So this is a story about how bodies become books and books become bodies.
It's about how bodies can be sliced into planes, which can be copied or made into
pages imprinted with images and words, and how those pages can be cut
and cut out and assemble to create facsimiles of bodies. And it's about the fun you can
have with bodies and anatomical representation in new media, like woodcut engraving.
Yes, once upon a time woodcut engraving was new media, chromolithography, photography,
tracing paper, projected slides, glassine, and we'll talk about that in a little while.
Cellophane, acetate, plexiglass, halftone,
printing and even slices of the body itself.
So it's today I want to connect --this.
To.
This.
To.
This.
To.
This.
And to.
This. --I got a lot of
this' going on here and.
Even. If we carry it into the era of digital anatomy. To this, which is very familiar
to people who work at the National Library of Medicine.
So it's about flaps and overlaps and
layers and slices of human meat that are made into the leaves of a book,
or other sequences of overlaid 2 dimensional surfaces.
And all of this paper cutting and corpse slicing and bookmaking are methods of
producing and circulating knowledge, heuristic devices that enable us to imaginatively,
even cognitively undertake a reflexive recursive cycle of deconstruction.
And reconstitution engineering and reverse engineering.
An alternating current of personhood, self and other, mind-body, me, not me.
And in this oscillation, there's a crazy kind of bipolar pleasure
for both the producer and the viewer, and taking the body apart and
putting it back together like a puzzle or a game or a toy.
And that implicates all of us. So.
Keep all of that under your hat and let's begin with act one, life-size
flat books and topographical phantoms. Phantom being the German term
for a flap anatomy. This part will be familiar to you.
The flap anatomies that first appeared in the 16th century featured cut out layers of
printed wood or copper plating engravings. Attached by glue or paste to a base,
it was an interactive device which sometimes had to be assembled by the purchaser.
Each layer conceals all or part of the layer underneath. Readers could peel back the layers
one level at a time, step by step, to reveal the innards of the figure.
The usual progression is from skin down to reproductive parts or skeleton.
The procedure is an uncovering of paper flaps over the underlying base page.
Flap anatomies were sometimes called dissected plates, a term which asserts that in cutting
paper and then opening up the assemblage of cut paper layers, the reader is in some way reenacting
a dissection that refers back to the dissections of dead bodies that anatomists do.
In the hierarchy of printed materials, the flap anatomy had the status of a toy,
a novelty that brought anatomical knowledge, often adulterated with astrological
or religious elements, to a wider, non medical audience. It was part of a larger universe
of interactive printed objects. There were flap geologies, flap mechanical diagrams,
even flap satirical cartoons such as one in which the Pope was opened up to
reveal his hypocrisy and corruption, obviously part of Reformation era theological politics.
Wish I could show that to you, but I don't have a good image of that
and we don't have that in our collection. By the late 19th and early 20th century,
the flap anatomy was a familiar part of commercial, medical and health publishing.
Mass produced mainly for a lay audience. It often appeared as a bonus,
a gimmick that attracted buyers in the increasingly crowded market for
home health and sexology books. Pictured here, an insert from an early 20th century home health book,
among which other things featured flaps of the breasts and quote "organs of generation"
UN quote. I got the and that's showing you the right slides.
This is the flap anatomy. I'm sorry, I'm a little mixed up here.
OK. There we go. OK, so that's this.
So this is the home health book. Other flap anatomies modestly omitted
the genitals for those who might take offense. Without any marketing science.
Publishers cater to readers who wanted to observe decorum and those who wanted to violate it.
The Desexed mannequin could be used for instructional purposes and books intended
for both male and female students. The sex mannequin had an erotic frisson.
The mere possession and view of it was titillating, but unlike pornography it had some
license to represent human sexuality because it was framed with educational,
moral and medical justification.
OK, this is a little confusing here. OK, in the late 19th century,
flap anatomy mannequins became more colorful,
grew bigger and were sold in quarter half and life-size additions. And flaps proliferated.
And some additions had hundreds. The life-size mannequin was a standalone novelty,
which served as an all-in-one wall chart for classrooms and doctor's offices and as a prop for health
lectures and patent medicine, huckster shows. There was no obligation for the
mannequin to be consistent or coherent. White's mannequin had flaps derived
from a hodgepodge of sources, some of them going back as far as the 17th century.
Mixed in with the sequential anatomical layers where flaps that illustrated the evils of corsetry.
I think you can see one in the opening there lessons on venereal
disease and the drunkard's stomach and how to do minor surgery.
Although obviously masculine,
Dr. Franke's Phantom was a very queer mannequin, had both male and female organs
of generation, and was pregnant. In fact, multiply pregnant.
With lessons on fetal development, breech births and twin births.
It was well suited for museum stage, lecture hall or classroom where lecturers opened it up.
For display, hung on a wall or propped up on a metal or wooden apparatus,
it performed the role of universal human, an epitome of human anatomy,
but a very parochial and historically specific version of the universal human,
as all universals must inevitably be. The individual flaps and organs pictured are neatly outlined,
precisely cut, contained an order of things that in some way supports a cultural ideal.
Atomic individualism, in which anatomy supplies sharply delineated internal boundaries.
The anatomical illustration is a template of embodied order within the unit of a single person.
But the sheer quantity of the flaps,
way too many layers, spoil that ideal. The overall effect is extravagant, excessive.
The life-size mannequin is a thicket of body parts, lesions, wounds, practical lessons,
science lessons all match to Roman numerals, numbers, letters and captions, and they
always come with a booklet to explain. Which mimetically suggests the tangled
complexity of actual flesh and alludes to the complex thickets of social, technological,
political relations and which the flesh was entangled.
Some flap anatomies were scientifically
and aesthetically coherent. This small, technically precise phantom of the normal nose from
1914, features a beautifully rendered cross section of the head. Unlike White's mannequin,
it was aimed at a specialized market of general practitioners, serious students,
and eye, ear and nose and throat specialists.
...
It was a high end product rendered with photographic precision and no doubt based on photographs.
Although it too is a species of universal human the normal nose, it shows a meticulously detailed
view of a particular face. And the nasal passages of a particular
man who was dissected upon his death. Define an orderly detail gives the phantom of the normal nose.
Rhetorical heft lends its scientific conviction and authority. And yet, even while it participates
and contributes to a sober mechanical objectivity, which is something that a lot of
historians write about nowadays, it's still a toy. The reader gets to playfully peel
open the nose and then the face, almost like unwrapping a present.
The base layer is a bisected head. A two dimensional plane with topographical
features, a cross section. The basic technique of topographical anatomy.
So now let's talk about topographical anatomy. By the mid 19th century.
Anatomy was no longer a field for exciting new findings. The action had shifted to pathology,
microbiology and embryology. Topographical anatomy, a new field based on a new technique,
allowed anatomists to renew their claim to being modern, scientific, and productive.
In classical anatomy, the anatomy that Vesalius does, the anatomist dissects out parts and systems
using a scalpel and other instruments. Illustrations derived from the
dissection where usually rendered in some kind of illusionistic perspective.
In topographical anatomy, the anatomist freezes the body and then uses a saw.
Or slicing device to convert the cadaver into a series of flat surfaces,
front to back, top to bottom or side to side. Such surfaces could be precisely traced
onto paper or glass and then given over to artists and printers for refinement,
labeling and coloring. The claim then was that the anatomical illustration rendered
by an artist freehand was inferior to the topographical illustration.
The topographical illustration had a higher epistemological status.
The new cross section technique of topographical anatomy was invented by Pieter de Riemer,
a Dutch anatomist who in the winter of 1814 15,
froze a cadaver and sought it into slices, thereby inaugurating what some
anatomists dubbed anatomy's "Ice Age." Riemer only published
a scant and imprecise folio of torso slices.
...
The great Russian anatomist Nikolai Pirogov, taking advantage of the long and frigid Russian winter,
also claimed to have invented the frozen cross section. He began his work some 15 years after de Riemer,
but was much more systematic and made the first highly detailed,
comprehensive atlas of topographical anatomy. And here this looks familiar to those
of you who know visible human slices. This is the technique which human visible human is founded upon.
In the 1860s, Leipzig anatomist Wilhelm Braune
became the first important exponent of topographical anatomy. Not the first,
I mean became the most important exponent. Students came from all over Europe,
particularly Edinburgh, to study with Braune, and a whole new subfield of anatomy arose,
which came to be identified as the Edinburgh School. North America, Johns Hopkins, Columbia,
McGill and University of Wisconsin were centers of topographical anatomy and,
after the development of mechanical refrigeration, Sydney University in Australia.
They have an amazing collection of topographical anatomical slices there at the university.
Braune sliced and mapped his frozen cadavers, making beautiful colored atlases in
which each slice corresponds to a page. There's a kind of shine to his illustrations,
a glow which emanates from the rich color palette of the artists and lithographers.
This only gives a very pale. Tracing of what they actually did,
you have to actually see the these volumes to believe them and also the glow also comes from the Halo
of captions which surround the figures and point to their details. It was a spectacularly precise,
learned and beautiful production.
Another German anatomist, Nikolaus Rüdinger, was the first to make extensive
use of photography. In the 1870s, photography was already several decades old,
but the technology of reproducing photographs on the printed page was still new and in development.
Photography was part of the rhetoric of modernity, of technological innovation,
and seen, at least potentially, to be a valuable scientific instrument.
Even heavily retouched and colorized, Rüdinger's use of photography emphasizing
contributes to the epistemological claims of his topographical anatomy. Even better than tracing.
We've got a photograph of the slice. Topographical anatomy, because it renders the body into a
series of two-dimensional planes, is particularly well suited for
print and gave rise to a number of
new and prestigious publications.
Not every anatomist was enchanted. Bridge professor of surgery Thomas Cooke condemned topographic
anatomy as a faddish pretension, a paper anatomy that doesn't give aspiring
surgeons the tactile experience of cutting the body with a scalpel or aid in
development of hand eye coordination like traditional dissection. And turning the body into
a series of two-dimensional slices, topographical anatomy was less true
to nature than the dissected body and three-dimensional specimens in models derived therefrom,
or so it was argued. Now photography here then counters this a bit.
As you can see it takes away some of the paperish of topographical anatomy,
especially in these ones that combinea three-dimensional view of the
body with a slice cross section. Whatever the case, topographical anatomy was a strangely
perverse form of fun for anatomist. It's novelty and visuality were almost irresistible
to ambitious anatomists. As in flap anatomy, the topographical anatomical atlas
superimposed a series of opaque slices and writings on the subject
topographical anatomists rhetorically invoked transparency and sometimes
made images that look transparent, slices that opened a window into the interior of the body.
But there was no actual transparency.
...
I don't have a timer up here, so when we get somewhere close to 40 45
minutes of my lecture, could you just.
You can just tap me on the shoulder or say.
I can't see it. My eyes are the harsh glare of the spotlights.
You know that. OK, OK, wave, jump up and down. OK, anyway,
so these are a couple of quotes. Where are anatomists in the late 19th
early 20th century invoked the idea of transparency?
...
But Rüdinger actually didn't have a system, a system of topographical anatomy.
His plan of slices you can, you can see here from this photograph,
look a little bit like a butcher's diagram. So it's not. I mean,
there's it's a little more systematic than some other ones who do the
butcher's diagram, but still.
All right, Act 2, scene 2. I began by arguing that there was
crazy pleasure in all of this. And that next brings us to Eugène-Louis Doyen's
topographical anatomy of 1911. Historians have mainly written about
Doyen as a pioneering medical filmmaker. He produced and starred in more than 60
motion pictures between 1898 and 1906, including a film of a notorious surgery to
separate conjoined twins, didn't go well. But he was also the inventor and
promoter of new surgical devices, new surgical instruments and techniques and treatments,
including a widely publicized electrical therapy for cancer and tuberculosis.
By all accounts, including his own, he was a prodigious surgeon who performed
difficult surgeries with precision, speed and theatrical flourish.
He was a fencer as well as a surgeon. In politics, he was a controversialist,
a man of the left who played a minor rolein [?Lafayette Dolphus?] and Medicine.
He was a notorious provocateur and periodically denounced the Parisian medical establishment.
Supporters described him as brilliant, detractors as a charlatan.
...
Issued in seven installments his atlas of 279 heliotype photographic
plates of cross section bodies radically departed from past practice.
Stratigraphy was then an axiomatic principle of geology, but geology
studies naturally occurring layers. Doyen brutally imposed his layers upon his anatomical subjects.
Unlike clinicians, anatomists were slow to adopt photography.
It was not until the early 20th century, some 30 years after Rüdinger
publications, that Doyen and a few other anatomists exploited photography
as a visual rhetoric of the real and systematic anatomical atlases. Even then,
the photographs were highly contrived, silhouetted and posed, much like the lithographs theme,
to supersede. Most of the new photographic anatomies were topographical.
Of these, Doyen's was by far the most theatrical, the most rigorous, the most starkly uncompromising.
His plates are brilliantly eccentrically staged and arresting combination of beauty and monstrosity.
Seriality, the arrangement of objects
into series, was increasingly important in 19th and early 20th century science,
a marker of a certain kind of scientific work that paid more attention to methodology.
Serious scientists sought to collect and study series of specimens, arranged and divided into some
standardized order or gradient. To show a range of variations in a class.
The rationale was that the objects of study could be compared, and from these comparisons and
collections of idiosyncratic specimens, the scientists could derive generalizable laws or principles.
Well, that was axiomatic and comparative anatomy and racial anatomy and evolutionary biology.
And embryology is unusual in general anatomy.
...
So that's Doyen and we I've showed you a bit. How did he do it?
How did he make these slices? First, he preserved the cadavers with a series of formalin injections
to harden the organs while maintaining their shape and colour. No freezing required and this
is a one of his innovations. After the injections, the cadavers were left to cure
and harden for two to six months. The length of time, depending on levels of fat in the body.
Having undergone what he called this veritable scientific mummification,
the bodies were secured on a mobile trolley on rails and fed through something he called a megatone.
Not a microtone, a megatone. A 5 meter long bandsaw running on a 6 horsepower engine.
The slices mounted and sequentially
photographed for reproduction in the atlas were then retained for use in lectures and displays.
So they have an afterlife in the anatomical museum and on the lecture stage.
The photographic plates were heavily retouched and silhouetted,
a bizarre hybrid of photography and painting.
The face is fully visible in many of
these seems in some pictures to stare out
at the viewer imploringly or in horror. Even more shocking is the way Doyen
provocatively took the body apart, slice by slice in every dimension, and then put it back together,
an anatomical theatre of cruelty. Anatomical atlases are often theatrical,
but none is more glaringly transgressive. Doyen's anatomy converges with Grand [?],
which was then very popular on the Parisian stage, and its sensationalism,
it's desire to shock a shock intensified.
By the specificity of the anatomical subject
whose face and body are utterly exposed. In most of the atlas Doyen poses
and completely silhouettes his subject so that they appear to stand free,
almost defiantly alive in the
negative space of the page.
Doyen's first attempt to publicly present his anatomical slices caused a riot.
On April 19, 1910, an audience of over 2000 people assembled in the Grand
Amphitheatre at the Faculty of Medicine in Paris to see the first lecture of
his course in topographic anatomy, which was to be illustrated with hand
colored slides of Doyen's photographic plates as well as preserved specimens.
Doyen had recently made remarks condemning the French medical profession,
and the audience was stocked with medical students determined to defend
the honor of their professors. Soon after the lecture commenced, Doyen was forced to stand by as a
chorus of boos and whistles broke out, paper planes thrown from the audience gave
way to stones and fistfights broke out. The Faculty of Medicine responded by
suspending the course, but Doyen, ever resourceful, nimbly moved on to other venues,
where he continued to give lectures featuring projections, some magnified, as in the above picture,
and dissections performed on the spot. For audiences of up to 1000.
...
So here the captions you can see provide a table of contents for
the sequence of slices to follow. And to do this, he has to.
Put all the slices back together. But if Doyen made the body into a series of flat pages,
this particular book, like no flap anatomy and no other topographical anatomy,
emphasized in almost a sculptural way, the three dimensionality of the body. It's meaningless,
it's volume, and it's helplessness before the anatomist.
This is the only series in which Doyen places the anatomical
subject on the table on anatomical guillotining in multiple slices.
...
Doyen was a compulsive grandstander who never failed to attract a large audience,
but this dramatizing imperative runs up against scientific skepticism. Theatricality is the trademark
of the charlatan, the hoaxer, and a certain trope of scientific discourse,
councils sober objectivity and modesty, both in claims and in the demonstration of results.
So the topographical anatomist has to walk a fine line, a line which Doyen deliberately crossed
in a defiant challenge to his colleagues. Who returned the favor by treating
him with contempt and denying him a chair on the faculty.
OK, I've described flap anatomy as a toy, a marketing gimmick, gimmick,
something that made anatomy pleasurable. Doyen's topographical atlas was
more scientific and provocative. But in the late 19th and early 20th century,
a time of proliferating technologies and inventions in the printing trade, there comes another novel
approach for anatomy, the anatomical translucency.
Going to go through this pretty quickly. Depending on the kind of ink used,
facing pages with one or more images may acquire an unwanted image transfer. A ghost.
There you go. Book owners inserted translucent sheets
of some kind of manufactured paper, sometimes onion skin, tissue paper,
vellum to prevent image transfers. This paper protected against ghosts
sometime in the 19th century. Publishers begin binding these into books by design,
especially in expensive books in deluxe editions. And around the turn of the 20th century,
publishers began using these translucent pages as vehicles to print text and diagrams.
The insert was no longer needed to prevent off printing. Image transfer didn't occur with new inks,
papers and printing techniques. Translucent overlays were often used,
most often used to label and emphasize specific details of an illustration,
since a strong printed image could be seen underneath.
The gimmick served to seductively veil the illustration functioned
as a novelty, an embellishment. This is an otherwise unexceptionable,
unexceptional psychiatric nursing textbook, but here the translucent overlay packages
the illustration much in the same way that external wrappers do in packages,
and likely for the same reason, to charm buyers and give them and give readers something to do a bit
of interactivity that played on their desire to look underneath.
A few deluxe publications with more credible scientific aspirations used
overlays and illustrated studies. Gustav Killian's accessory sinuses of the nose met the higher,
higher standards of academic medicine, while at the same time serving as a shining
achievement of fine printing technology. For the effect to work, the overlay and base illustration
had to be in precise alignment. And here's what it looks like.
The pairing of diagram and drawing in the overlay suggests that every
object in the material world can also be paired with a diagram, a diagrammatic ghost,
which makes it legible, delineates internal boundary boundaries, supplies captions,
and that collapses the boundary between diagram and drawing, and by extension, between representation
and the thing represented. In other words, this particular genre was a
contribution to what some scholars have called the culture of the diagram,
a culture that had its own cognitive effects.
More rarely, the translucent overlay played
a directly functional role here at maps. It maps points that match the underlying
structures of the body where an electro therapist should apply electrodes.
But in general, the translucent overlay was not well suited to anatomical illustration.
The translucent layer obscures too much of the underlying base illustration,
and authors are limited to two layers.
...
Now, all of this is taking place at a time when there is a larger middle UA
proliferating culture of superimposition. Newspaper, magazine and book publishers
often presented one layer page layouts that superimpose diagram upon photograph. This photo montage,
originally published in the early in an early 20th century science magazine
and reprinted many times thereafter, visually argues that human anatomy contains
within it an evolutionary homologue. The bones of the human jaw and ear correspond
to the jawbones of an ancient fish. In preparing the artwork for this kind of illustration,
designers and mechanical artists, as they were then called,
increasingly made separate layers of glass, translucent paper, celluloid and acetate plastics as
they become commercially available, which can then either be printed in
one layer or in registered layers.
Now the growing use of overlays in print technology and motion picture industry,
along with the evident pleasures of the form, fueled further development in the printed overlay.
In the 1920s, the medical publisher Bailliere issued the first multilayer
anatomical overlay series. There are synthetic anatomy used glassine, a
nearly transparent paper made from very clean chemical wood pulps rolled through
a machine under heavy pressure to create a highly glazed and nearly transparent finish.
The synthetic anatomy was marketed to medical and pre-med students in promotional literature.
Bailliere emphasized that it's synthetic anatomy could stand in some way as
a quote "substitute for the body" and facilitate quote "the reconstruction
of mental pictures of the body." Reviews in the medical press were highly favorable.
Glassine was transparent enough
to allow for multilayer anatomical plates that readers could see through,
creating a novel illusion of depth. Sheets of the synthetic anatomy were
printed on both sides and can be viewed in sequence cumulatively in either direction.
For the effect to work, the color registration and alignment of sheets has to be precise.
John Eric Cheesman, a London deputy medical officer of health,
prepared the series from dissections and radiographs, X-rays. And the X-ray, of course,
is one of the emblematic technologies of modernity, the object of public
fascination for many decades, and part of its charm was that it affected an implicit superimposition
of correspondence between the living human subject and it and its interior.
The X-ray flattened and transcribed the living body rendered it as a
shadowy 2 dimensional transparent image that could be lit from the back with a light box or projected
onto the screen of a fluoroscope.
The synthetic anatomy lacked the X-rays epistemological status. It didn't claim to show a
specific object, a real thing. It's entirely an idealized representation in which the
hand of the artist is visible. But it accomplishes something that an X-ray can't,
a layering of outlines and colors.
A strangely flattened 3 dimensionality.
These beautiful photographs were made by Australian physician artist photographer Mark Kessell,
who collaborated with me on this project. They really deserve to be seen on
top of a light box as transparencies.
So. There you go, structured series
of overlaid images which combine to
make a cumulative aggregate image. Glassine was shiny and smooth and
novel and technological enough. Another achievement of industrial
modernity, albeit a fairly obscure one. 90 years after it was published,
you can see it don't age well.
It becomes yellow and brittle overtime. The coordinates help the printer and
reader keep the overlays aligned. They also help the reader focus
on a particular region and scale. And that brings us. I know, I'm sorry I'm bombarding
you with so many images, but it's hard for me to kind of.
...
[indistinct audience chatter]
I'm gonna go for another 5. Aim for five questions, OK, yeah, I do. I don't wanna do it, so I'll.
I'll go through these topical transparencies pretty quickly.
In the 1920s and 30s there were celebrated 3 dimensional transparent anatomical objects.
Verner Spalter Holtz, a distinguished German anonymous, developed an injection technique that
made anatomical specimens transparent and his specimens were famously displayed at
the Deutsches Hygiene Museum in Dresden. The same museum featured a larger than
life plastic model of an anatomical man, and transparent figures from the
same workshops appeared in Chicago and the New York World's Fair. Other prominent locations
enthusiasm for transparency and medicine was fueled by contemporary
technologies and commercial practices. Just to remind you, the 1920s and 30s were a time of
large plate glass window displays and department stores and museums. Bakelite plastic appliances,
cellophane wrapping, shiny metal and glass automobiles, proliferation of mass manufactured
shiny metal and glass objects. In other words, transparency and anatomy was part
of a larger cultural fascination with transparency and shininess. Here's the first documented use of
plastic and anatomical illustration. We have here an unheralded work which
featured us four layer cellophane sequence of the structure of the hand. It's very brittle.
We couldn't open it up because it would break.
So obviously this was not terribly
practical for mass publication. And this was really an experiment.
We don't know really what went on in 1929 to produce this. This is a lot of these things I'm
showing you are research projects for some further scholarship.
Acetate plastic was much more usable. The first acetate anatomical overlay,
the human eye and anatomical transparency was published in 1943 by Bausch and Lomb.
The lens and instrument makers featured artwork by Gladys McHugh,
graduate of the medical illustration program at Johns Hopkins and the
student of the great Max Brödel. Initially, overlay transparency was expensive to produce.
Only one printing company specialized in it. But it was an exciting novelty.
This form of plastic had only been introduced in 1934. Other transparency books published around
the same time an overlay of the B 17 bomber, the Flying Fortress,
and an overlay of a pocket watch.
So this is human eye and transparency got rave reviews in the
medical press sold out its first run.
The eyes are twice the size of a human eye. Plastic pages folded with the
image printed on both sides and register transparencies. Quite beautiful color,
shiny, shiny, shiny.
The human ear in anatomical transparency is a second major publication by McHugh,
more polished and precise. Dreamy, voluptuous masterpiece,
in my estimation. It was published by Sonotone, a hearing aid company,
and like the Transparent Eye, it was a critical success sold out its print run. The impact of this really
takes place after the war. In 1946, World Book encyclopedia began
including a a section of transparencies in its article on human anatomy. It's enormous.
publishing success in the World Book encyclopedia rockets to the top of a pretty crowded market
in illustrated encyclopedias. 50s and 60s. Other encyclopedia makers follow suit.
A lot of Newville, Lahousse, Compton's Picture encyclopedia, Encyclopedia Britannica all adopt some
version of the anatomical transparency also,
appeared in popular health guides such as
Better Homes and Gardens and Guide to Health. There's a a pharmaceutical company,
I'm not going to talk too much about these, except that they're wonderful and zonked and crazy.
These are marketed just to physicians.
Oops. Wrong way. And.
Just to give you a close-up on these. Looks like a zonked undersea world.
It's sort of like if you invented the F MRI,
F MRI on LSD. A brave new world of medical imaging right there.
And so that's takes me really to the end. This is,
I'm talking about a recombinant anatomy. It was eye candy for surgeons,
physicians, teachers, students, and of course, also for historians. You can take bodies apart,
put them back together, scale them up and down, dominate them.
But they're more than just eye candy.
Art historian David Friedberg argues that images have the power to affect us in all sorts of ways,
that there's a particularly peculiarly recursive power of the image,
and the anatomical representation, I would argue in this case,
is a kind of portmanteau conceptual identity object which we carry around with us or
put on the shelf as need or desire arises.
And it also affirms and contributes to an aesthetic order.
The anatomical illustration is a spectacular advertisement for itself and its creators and sponsors,
and for its readers, a mirror. And in our time an object of desire.
Can also be defined defamiliarizing, queering. We can be led into objection, forced to confront or
abjure our own monstrosity, which doesn't affirm anything.
There's a kind of cognitive tingle to some of this stuff, which is
what the freak show capitalizes on.
And the imperative in all of this is to make it new. There's an but more than that,
there's an order of things. It's the order of screens and windows and glass and plastic which
overlay our view of everything. Cognitive membranes left loose, or sorted sequentially and
cumulatively into books of membranes, then compiled and sorted again into libraries of books,
and so on, and exchanged and shown off in gift and
patronage and cash economies. Based on technologies that get us to look,
designed to get us to look and move on to the next view and I think I'm gonna skip this next slide.
Excuse me but this maybe you can get
the idea what I was aiming at and. So many more questions. That's my show. Intel.
Stack of slices of the human body can simulate the leaves of a book,
stack of transparencies can simulate the layered depth of the human body,
and there are profits to be made and knowledge to be gained and pleasures
to be had with which structure, the very act of looking, and the identity of the looker.
So I'm just going to end with this little, slide.
How profoundly, does all of this affect us? Does anatomy reside at some superficial
or middling cognitive level? Or, after almost 5 centuries of anatomical representation,
does it run deep in us. "In a traffic of dead bodies," my book on anatomy and embodied social
identity in 19th Century America, I argue that anatomy was more than just
a putting on of anatomical clothes, more than a superficial fashion. But anatomy is fashionable in
given moments in our moment. So here I leave you with a model Fashion Week in China,
wearing an anatomical gown.
So thank you all. And that's my talk --the,
[applause]
--end. Do we have time for questions
or did I use it up? Certainly. If anybody wants to make
a comment or question. OK. Well, I guess we'll go
from front to back here.
[Audience:] [off-microphone]
Address at what point? For some of these images, I mean some of them seemed
not to have labels at all. And then when and and the depth of labeling.
[Dr. Sappol:] That's a great question.
Labeling is really important and that. I would have talked about that.
That would be a whole other talk. But yeah, so labeling comes from the very, very beginning.
And if you go back, let's say the first anatomical illustrations,
even monsoor from the 13th, 14th century, they have writing written right on the page
with the body sometimes right over the image.
Vesalius has highly captioned images which have little
letters or numbers linked to.
Both discussion and also just descriptive
labels and so that.
There is a way in which part of the diagrammatic ghost that I talked about
is the alphabet soup of captions that
also are attached to all of these images. So all of these images have
them in some way or other. I --focusing on the images, I've isolated them.
I didn't show the pages where the images occur, where they captions occur and
most of them you'll see have little letters or numbers and the. The [?Doctor, Francis Fantome?],
has a little caption book that's got 1000 or so just captions
and they go from numbers and letters of the alphabet and
then Roman numerals and then, Roman numerals mixed with numbers
and letters and goes on and on.
Next. Steve.
[Steve Greenberg:] Thanks Mike, 2 comments and a question. The plastic sheets,
the overlay sheets from the Oxford book are almost certainly lithographs on top of plastic.
[Say that again] the the plastic overlays you saw in the Oxford 1920s.
Yeah, OK, that's almost certainly lithography onto plastic instead of onto paper.
It would be by far the simplest way to do it. [Sure] The other thing about glassine,
the reason why glassine ages so poorly, is it's really acidic. And it's a real problem.
A lot of books that simply have illustrations, portraits and such in the 19th century,
with glassine guards, book conservation people
just take the glassine out because it's so acidic.
When the glassine is carrying content, you have another issue, but that's the problem.
It's even more acidic than the paper.
[Dr. Sappol:] Yeah, I mean, a lot of those overlay sheets are not glassine
There's some other technology, but they're all aesthetic, though, The point point taken.
[Steve Greenberg:] And then I have a question for you. The Rüdinger photographic stuff from the 1870s.
How were the photographs actually reproduced? Are they photographs that are
pasted in? Are they heliotypes?
[Dr. Sappol:] No, they're
they're they're printed right on the page. [Steve Greenberg:] I have to see those, yeah, because they are.
That's before halftones. That's that's a really, you know, the the standard thing to do at that
point was either on heliotypes, which is a way of making a printing plate
from the gelatin of the photographic plate, which is really expensive and
hard to control. Or what's also more common is to
have an artist do a lithographic stone from the from the photograph,
which is something that the Army Medical Library helped to perfect
in the 1860s with the medical surgical history of the Civil War. [Dr. Sappol:] It's a good question. My impression,
my first impression is that it's holotype, but it may be 2 register printing
because there's a color layer on there. [Steve Greenberg:] Look how it's done by hand.
[Dr. Sappol:] Yeah, well, I don't.
They don't look like they done by hand. OK. But anyway. Anyone else?
I know the few people had the hands up. Doctor Ken.
[Ken Koyle:] So this this runs
the risk of going into a whole other discussion topic as well. [Steve Greenberg:] but that's what we're here for.
[Ken Koyle:] When the topographical anatomists like Doyen were
petrifying and slicing up these bodies. Where were they getting the bodies at that point?
What was were these donors, would these have been John Does? Would where
would these bodies have been coming from? [Dr. Sappol:] No, that's a great question and you know obviously.
Our current best practices would not permit this kind of thing.
You can see it. How? Directly,
these anatomical subjects address us. They were not obtained with consent.
Clearly not that these are probably that's a research question, but my it's almost certain that he
got these bodies from the morgue in Paris where the bodies were laid out and if they weren't claimed.
Anatomists. Had them. And of course, throughout the 19th century,
Paris was famous for its rich bounty of cadavers to dissect
from the morgue in that fashion?
Yeah. So I mean. He Doyen was
particularly aggressive in having we could have her
face us and we face them.
Raises all kinds of questions. Yeah, anyone else?
I've kept you long enough. Class dismissed I guess. [Dr. Reznick:] No, not yet, not yet.
[Dr. Reznick:] Can you say some more about the
materials you use that you refer to as? Alright.
Were you exact words were but that were materials used produced by organizations like Bausch and
Lomb for physicians in the middle to latter 20th century. What we would call ephemeral materials.
And here I'm referencing once you came back from a conference it may have been the "Ted Med" talk that
you attended and and you brought back a lot of this ephemeral material and and I think that's
partly what you were alluding to. Can you say some more about that as a
source from which you've drawn for your. [Michael Sappol:] Well, it's, it's it's a vexed and interesting topic. I mean,
there's this wide, wide world of printed material. Lisa Gittleman,
a historian of media and technology, is calls it the dark matter of print culture.
But which in saying that she's saying that, you know, what physicists say about dark matter
is it far exceeds visible matter and yet it hasn't been studied. So job printing,
which is printing often of novelty and other kinds of specialty
publication far in terms of volume and sales and and economics,
far exceeds the world of book publishing.
And so and it has its own special culture and techniques and and it
and so these participate in that Bausch and the second thing is of
course Bausch and Lomb is marketing to
ophthalmologists, opticians.
Wholesalers, retailers there it's not.
Just a and it's not a purely medical market and also there's a moment in
which Bausch which medical products are not marketed to the general public. I mean there's a ethical
line where pharmaceuticals. So I showed I think that brain, the crazy brain thing which is
done by Abbott Laboratories. They weren't allowed to, they weren't really selling a product.
They were, they're really selling the brand to physicians and this was probably just a
giveaway, I mean an amazing giveaway. But and then the quite the vexed question for us in the
National Library Medicine is how do we collect this? Or do we collect it? Of course we have all
these historical things, but. The dark matter of publications by
pharmaceutical companies now would just
bury us if we if we took just
what Pfizer or Merck or Glaxo or
Novartis publishes in a year. We
couldn't handle the load, but on the other hand it's really significant stuff.
I mean, I know it's as a patient, you know, he gets some, you get treatment with interferon,
you get a fancy published book that's got a thermometer in it and a blood
pressure gauge all built into it's real specialty gimmick publication. You don't need all that crap.
And you know the, the, the, the drug itself costs, you know, $1000 a shot, so.
You think that spare me the fancy printing and cut the price of the drug is what I would say, but.
That's, but that's out there so you know who collects it? It didn't.
No one probably you know even the, the the pharmaceutical company that produces this stuff probably
doesn't have a big enough warehouses to keep all the stuff.
They probably just you know goes to landfill. Hope it's recyclable.
Well, I guess that's it. Class dismissed.
Thank you all for coming. [Dr. Reznick:] Thanks Mike very much.
[applause]
[auditorium wide shot]
[The End]