Today, some thoughts about art and dissection. The
University of Houston's College of Engineering
presents this series about the machines that make
our civilization run, and the people whose
ingenuity created them.
Medicine entered the 14th
century as a scholastic discipline. Doctors used
Aristotelian logic to talk about hypothetical body
humors. Then, suddenly, the greatest medical
calamity ever known descended on Asia and Europe.
The Black Plague was quite beyond the reach of
14th-century medicine. So medical practice was
driven out of its ivory tower and into the
empirical laboratory of observation and of trial
and error.
Scientists began asking how the human body really
worked. By the 16th century people were cutting
into dead bodies to see how they might deal with
live ones. But dissection alone wasn't enough. We
needed means for retaining what those cadavers had
shown us. So art joined medicine. Leonardo da Vinci
was far from the first of these artists, but he was
famous for recording his own dissections. He tells
us about the work:
And though you should have a love for such
things you may perhaps be deterred by natural
repugnance, and if this does not prevent you, you
might be deterred by fear of passing the night
hours in the company of these corpses, quartered
and flayed and horrible to behold.
After Leonardo, dissection became an increasingly
basic part of medicine. The great Flemish masters
all took an interest in it. And as the demand for
cadavers rose, so did grave-robbing and even more
terrible means for getting dead bodies. By the 18th
century, every medical student did dissection, and
only one tenth of those corpses came from legal
sources.
In 1800 high principle was gone from dissection. It
was part of a dirty illegal underground. Artists
had once seen it as lying at the core of their job
of representing the human condition. Now no artist
would go near it.
Instead, the literature took up arms against
grave-robbing. Charles Dickens and Mark Twain
painted terrible pictures of it. Most ghastly of
all was Mary Shelley's scientist, Victor
Frankenstein, who cut up stolen bodies for the
parts needed to make his fearful monster. To make
matters worse, 18th-century romanticism led to a
more morbid view of death. It was harder to see
sentimentalized death as mere passage. People tried
to deny death. An early use of the new art of
photography was to record the dead as though they
were still alive.
Early-19th-century romanticism mutated into
Victorian taboos about the human body. For a
hundred years, art and medicine had parted company,
and we were the poorer for it. Not until the late
1800s did artists turn their attention back to
medicine; and then medicine finally started moving
forward with the other sciences.
I'm John Lienhard, at the University of Houston,
where we're interested in the way inventive minds
work.
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