AN ILLUSTRATED HISTORY OF ANATOMY - AN OVERVIEW

This podcast provides an overview of how anatomy became illustrated beginning with Vesalius who conducted dissections himself and who inveigled the artist Jan Stephan van Calkar to provide exquisite illustrations. With this move anatomy switched from an aural to a new visual tradition and in allowing students to perform their own dissections it democratized anatomy as it acquired a new scientific method through the simple powers of observation. Although the artist and anatomist were looking at the same thing, their imperatives differed, anatomists striving for a precision and artists embellishing their work with an individual panache. By the mid-18th century when most of the macroscopic (so-called gross) anatomy had been discovered, the artists and the anatomists began to mutually drift apart and the art of anatomic illustration settled into a detached and dispassionate banality.