A rambling series of riffs on a gallery of eight images, as an entry point to some aspects of the impossibly vast topic of "the body" over a period of 120 (or more years), between 1800-1920, when there was a proliferation of bodies and body practices. The essay worries over the "body", "culture" and the logic that yokes those two categories together.

A meditation on the strange space and spaces of the human body, in two dialogues on: (1) an illustration, "The oxygen cycle: What goes on in you when you see this picture?" in Fritz Kahn's Das Leben des Menschen (1926); (2) the anatomical-pathological-medical Mütter Museum (Philadelphia). We think about divided spaces within the human body, relationships between corporeal/spatial embodiment and the representational space of the page, the representational space of representations, the space of the museum, spaces in the museum (galleries, vitrines, jars, etc.). At the same time, the paper is a conversation between phenomenology and Bakhtinian dialogics.

In early-nineteenth-century America, anatomical narrative was crucial to the acquisition and performance of medical identity. Dissecting the dead, robbing graves, making and exhibiting "anatomical preparations," and joking with bodies and body parts all served to affirm membership in the cult of medical knowledge. So did telling stories about such things. Through an examination of the autobiography of Charles Knowlton (1800-1850), a rural physician who practiced in northwestern Massachusetts, this article argues that the recitation and exchange of anatomical stories enabled medical practitioners to assert professional identity, healing competence, and filiations with theories and cliques. In both content and performance, the anatomical tale rehearsed the storyteller's structural relationship to patients, the public, colleagues and rivals, and, above all, made a claim to knowledge and mastery of the body.

A Traffic of Dead Bodies enters the sphere of bodysnatching medical students, dissection-room pranks, and anatomical fantasy. It shows how nineteenth-century American physicians used anatomy to develop a vital professional identity, while claiming authority over the living and the dead. It also introduces the middle-class women and men, working people, unorthodox healers, cultural radicals, entrepreneurs, and health reformers who resisted and exploited anatomy to articulate their own social identities and visions.
    The nineteenth century saw the rise of the American medical profession: a proliferation of practitioners, journals, organizations, sects, and schools. Anatomy lay at the heart of the medical curriculum, allowing American medicine to invest itself with the authority of European science. Anatomists crossed the boundary between life and death, cut into the body, reduced it to its parts, framed it with moral commentary, and represented it theatrically, visually, and textually. Only initiates of the dissecting room could claim the privileged healing status that came with direct knowledge of the body. But anatomy depended on confiscation of the dead--mainly the plundered bodies of African Americans, immigrants, Native Americans, and the poor. As black markets in cadavers flourished, so did a cultural obsession with anatomy, an obsession that gave rise to clashes over the legal, social, and moral status of the dead. Ministers praised or denounced anatomy from the pulpit; rioters sacked medical schools; and legislatures passed or repealed laws permitting medical schools to take the bodies of the destitute. Dissection narratives and representations of the anatomical body circulated in new places: schools, dime museums, popular lectures, minstrel shows, and sensationalist novels.
    Michael Sappol resurrects this world of graverobbers and anatomical healers, discerning new ligatures among race and gender relations, funerary practices, the formation of the middle-class, and medical professionalization. In the process, he offers an engrossing and surprisingly rich cultural history of nineteenth-century America.

With more than 17 million items dating from the eleventh century to the present, the National Library of Medicine, founded 175 years ago, is the world’s largest medical library—America’s home to a rich worldwide heritage of objects from rare early medical books to disturbing, precise nineteenth-century surgical illustrations to delightful mid-twentieth-century animated cartoons.
    Despite more than a century and a half of classification and cataloguing, buried in the sheer mass of this collection are wondrous items largely unseen by the public and obscure even to librarians, curators, and historians. The individual objects—rare, extravagant, idiosyncratic, and sometimes surprising—brought to light in this book glow with beauty, grotesquery, wit and/or calamitous tragedy. Among the objects featured are a series never before reproduced of hauntingly delicate paintings and illustrations of “monstra” collected in the early decades of the nineteenth century “from the museum of Dr. Klinkenberg” in the Netherlands; charming hand-painted glass “magic lantern slides,” which doctors projected in slideshows to entertain and help cure inmates at St. Elizabeths Hospital for the Insane; the mimeographed report of the Japanese medical team first to enter Hiroshima after the atomic blast; surreal views of mechanically sliced cadavers in the photographic anatomical atlas of fin-de-siècle France’s notorious surgeon-provocateur Eugène-Louis Doyen; and a staggering variety of objects from around the world and through seven different centuries.
    Each hidden treasure included here has been specially selected and is accompanied by a brief essay by a distinguished scholar, artist, collector, journalist, or physician. Delivered from the obscurity of the library’s massive archive, these marvels speak to us, charm us, repulse us, amaze us, inform us, and intrigue us—and present a tantalizing glimpse of some of the precious and remarkable objects to be found within one of the world’s great hidden treasures: the National Library of Medicine.

"The anatomical body is a body double—the essay calls it a mirror that first anatomists, and later a larger public, peered into. Anatomical illustration and display required collaboration between art and science, and eventually became the terrain on which art and science were defined in opposition to each other. Dream Anatomy invites you to look and think twice about the anatomical body and its relation to self. The appeal of the topic—anatomy, anatomical representation, the anatomical conception of self, whether treated historically, aesthetically, or scientifically—is evidenced by the wave of anatomical exhibitions that currently attract record-setting crowds, the popularity of anatomically-themed art, and the numerous scenes of anatomical dissection which now appear in movies and on TV. The history of anatomy, Dream Anatomy argues, is everybody’s history: we all think of ourselves as anatomical beings."
-- Elizabeth Fee

Mike Sappol discusses the power of the diagram for 19th-century sanitary  reformer T. Pridgen Teale. In an era when illustrated newspapers and magazines, and books like Alice in Wonderland, were captivating a mass audience, illustrations and diagrams seemed to have an almost magical rhetorical power.