The Languages of a Bodily Interior: Nineteenth-Century Anatomical Atlases in the Spaces of Art, Science, and the Museum

This dissertation reveals the ways that illustrated anatomical atlases were integral to the redefinition of the body and the medical profession during the first half of the nineteenth century in Western Europe. The study traces the emergence, production and growth of the anatomical atlas by examining the institutional and representational contexts in which they were produced and operated. It argues that as physicians began to establish visual genres as dominant modes of knowledge at the beginning of the century, anatomical illustrations were taken up as a tool in the constitution of new fields of power and knowledge. The dissertation begins with an examination of the discursive factors related to the emergence of a new scientific paradigm focused on pathological inquiry within medicine. This first section studies the shifts in governmental policies on health and sanitation in France and Britain that allowed physicians to take a distinct authority over the body as new clinical hospitals emerged. It traces how new techniques of power gave the nineteenth-century physician and scientific clinical medicine a more rigorous and instrumental status as dissection began to function as the basis of medical knowledge. In the second section, the dissertation looks at how newly re-ordered types of anatomical textbooks functioned to support the changing professional status of the physician. It examines the various shifts in nineteenth-century book illustration and printing technologies that emerged between 1800 and 1860, and provides a close analysis of the atlases' various systematizing formats, appearances, and structures. The last section focuses on the development of visual rhetorics in anatomical atlases over the first half of the nineteenth century. Here, the focus of analysis is on the specific visual codes, narrative sequences, and rhetorical tropes that combined with new medical practices to establish a new system of pathological anatomy. Characteristic of the emergent anatomico-clinico viewing apparatus was the relentless pursuit of normalization and idealization. An analysis of this complex visual language is extended to an examination of both the "healthy" norm and the surgical subject in surgical atlases, as well as the diseased body in pathological atlases.