It should be plain that visual studies are not my field of expertise. Nevertheless, it is equally plain that images are of great significance for the medical humanities. Accordingly, I am initiating a new category of posts here at MH Blog, "Imaging the Medical Humanities." The idea is to bring a visual element into the conversation, and then to say something briefly about the image's significance for the medical humanities.
While I am no art historian, I am indubitably, as any 'hermeneutician' would say, an interpreter.
For obvious reasons, I chose to start the series with an image taken from De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543):
The importance of De Fabrica for the medical humanities can hardly be overstated. Study of the humanitatis straddles the key transition from a late medieval attitude to empirical investigation to an early modern conception. Vesalius derides his contemporary "anatomists," who rely on classical (Aristotelian) authority in and of itself, who do not engage in dissection.
Turner refers to this emphasis on empirical investigation as the inquiring "Eye/I," and makes particular use of the metaphor in assessing Leonardo's work. Obviously, anatomical studies were central to the latter's corpus as well. Yet there were multiple reasons why Vesalius' interlocutors refrained from overreliance on the Eye/I. The concept of order was deeply engrained in medieval cosmogony. The presence of spheres was thought to order life and society on terra firma, and man himself was a microcosm of this larger structure.
Regardless of the current disputes over Galileo's trial, it seems undeniable, as Brecht shows, that Galileo seemed to incite antimony at least in part because of his Eye/I. The order of medieval life, at least in theory, could only bear so much empirical investigation, especially when that investigation challenged Scholastic dogma.
This is not to paint a picture of a benighted medieval world. Far from it. As I have mentioned here before, the High Middle Ages saw a remarkable flowering of culture. Humanism was a dialectic product of the late Middle Ages. Both Petrarch and Boccacio lived during the mid 1300s, and they were strongly influenced by medieval conceptions, even if they can be marked for their sometimes profound objections to such modalities.
In any case, dissection was a perilous enterprise during the Middle Ages. They were perilous for some time prior, as even Galen, the hero of medieval medicine, had empirical anatomical training only by examing the wounds of gladiators and the internal structure of primates. We can return to Vesalius, now, as even Vesalius honored Galenic tradition. Yet eventually, and with considerable reluctance, Vesalius broke with authority and followed his Eye/I.
This is some of the historical context for the importance of De Fabrica. Some of these ideas are instrumental in understanding the birth of the clinical gaze, the objectifying Eye.
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References
Mary G. Winkler, "Tragic Figures: Thoughts on the Visual Arts and Anatomy," Journal of the Medical Humanities 10, no. 1 (1989): 5-12.
A. Richard Turner, Inventing Leonardo (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).
Bertolt Brecht, Galileo (1966) (New York: Grove Press, 1994).
Allen Debus, Man and Nature in the Renaissance (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1978).
Colin Morris, The Discovery of the Individual (1050-1200) (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1972).
Vesalius Project, http://vesalius.northwestern.edu
This is lovely and a wonderful addition to your blog. Have you ever entertained the possibility of crossposting to Progressive Historians group blog? Your perspective and writing would be welcomed and well-received there.
Posted by: Annie | September 09, 2007 at 01:41 PM
Daniel,
If you've not seen it already, there's a wonderful comparison between Vesalius' Fabrica (1543) and Hua Shou's Shisijing fahui (1341) (figures 1 and 2 hereafter) in Shigehisa Kuriyama's The Expressiveness of the Body and the Divergence of Greek and Chinese Medicine (1999), with both figures reproduced on facing pages. Here's a bit from his discussion: "Viewed side by side, the two figures each betray lacunae. In Hua Shou, we miss the muscular detail of the Vesalian man; and in fact Chinese doctors lacked even a specific word for 'muscle.' Muscularity was a peculiarly Western preoccupation. On the other hand, the tracts and points of acupuncture entirely escaped the West's anatomical vision of reality. Thus, when Europeans in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries began to study Chinese medical teachings, the descriptions of the body they encountered struck them as 'phantastical' and 'absurd,' like tales of an imaginary land.
[....] [W]e are apt here to speak vaguely of different ways of thinking, or more slyly, of alternative perspectives: witnesses to an event often disagree, and not because of any dishonesty or clouded judgment, but just because of where they stand [think here of the Indian tale of the blind men and the elephant]." Kuriyama proceeds to note that in our case it's not a matter of (literal) spatial positioning: "So what exactly *could* we mean? What sorts of distances separate 'places' in the geography of medical imagination? How should we chart a map of viewpoints on the body?
[....] We cannot regard figures 1 and 2...or any other pair of pictures, as representing *the* Western and Chinese perspectives on the body. Neither tradition can be reduced to a single viewpoint.
Still, there is no denying the extraordinary influence--and cultural distinctiveness--of the perspectives that fixed on muscles in the one instance and acupuncture tracts in the other. It would be impossible to narrate a history of Western ideas about the structures and workings of the body without reference to muscles and muscular action; and any summary of Chinese medicine which failed to mention acupuncture tracts would be radically incomplete.
[....] The origins of these viewpoints long predate the two pictures. We encounter a well-developed theory of the muscular body already in the works of the Greek doctor Galen (130-200 C.E.); and by the end of the Latter Han dynasty (25-220 C.E.), which produced such canonical classics as the Huangdi neijing and Nanjing, the essential outlines of classical acupuncture would be securely in place.
[....] [Yet] if we delve deeper into the past, and examine earlier sources, such as the Hippocratic corpus and the Mawangdui manuscripts, the contrasts do not appear nearly as marked. We enter a world in which Greek doctors speak mostly of flesh and sinews rather than of muscles, and in which the Chinese art of needling has yet to be invented. This is perhaps the most compelling reason to scrutinize antiquity: such scrutiny allows us to reconsider figures 1 and 2 not as reflections of timeless attitudes, but as the results of historical change."
Posted by: Patrick S. O'Donnell | September 10, 2007 at 12:12 AM
Daniel,
A good starting image for discussion - that is for sure. Working as a medical illustrator, I have developed a strong interest between the relationships between artists and medical fields, and have been writing about topics related to this in my blog (address above). I've also been participating in some Medical Humanities events here in Halifax, Nova Scotia - at Dalhousie University.
Rather recently I was interviewed by a journalism student - who asked me a great question; "Why should artists of today be looking at and thinking about medical images?" My answer was that since we (= western medicine) have been looking at the human body in a systematic way for ONLY several hundred years, there is still a lot of thinking to do. Our relationships with images of the human body remains a central point in our culture, and we are only beginning to develope reasonably accurate impressions of the complexity and relationships that are present within human biology.
Enjoyed the piece, and look forward to seeing more posts to the medical images category.
Posted by: Tim Fedak | October 29, 2007 at 02:28 PM