Seeing

The Persian scholar, physician, and anatomist Manṣūr ibn Ilyās is widely credited with creating the first color atlas of the human body in the early 1400s. Organized into five chapters, the manuscript explores, through illustration and extensive notation, the skeleton, nervous system, muscles, veins, and arteries, with a final section depicting a pregnant woman. Mansur’s Anatomy was used in other Persian and Arabic medical treatises for more than 200 years. Much of the scholarship on early anatomists overlooks those working in the Medieval Islamic world, largely due to the still-debated assumption that religious beliefs prohibited the dissection of human bodies. Regardless of whether it evinces human dissection, Mansur’s Anatomy was still significant in that the use of color was previously considered to be against Islamic law.

The Flemish doctor and surgeon Andreas Vesalius has been heralded as the founder of modern anatomy. His 1543 publication De humani corporis fabrica, shown here in a 1568 reprint, was the first Western anatomical treatise to be based on close observation of the human body through dissection. Vesalius made dozens of discoveries as a result of his thoughtful research and disproved prevailing ideas about the body—primarily those espoused by the second-century Greek physician and philosopher Galen—that were not based on direct observation. Vesalius’s “muscle men” from a chapter on the muscular system are among the most iconic of all anatomical illustrations.  

Vesalius’s work has continued to influence artists and scholars today. Sean Caulfield’s Virus prints and The Anatomy Table, both on view in Healing, Knowing, Seeing the Body, adopt imagery straight from Vesalius’s illustrations. 

In 1545, Venetian artist Titian satirized a Hellenistic sculpture of Laocoön, a character from Greco-Roman myth, by showing Laocoön not as an idealized, muscular human but rather as a monkey. Titian’s odd drawing, transformed into a woodcut by Boldrini, has been interpreted as a subversive critique of the dominant understanding of the human body at the time, which was informed by the second-century teachings of the Greek physician, writer, and philosopher Galen. Galen and his followers based their understanding of human anatomy based solely on animal dissection, particularly the Barbary ape. In the mid 1500s, Andreas Vesalius began widely criticizing Galen’s ideas based on his direct observation of anatomy through comparative dissections of human cadavers.

Lucas Killian’s anatomical flap book is meant to educate through active manipulation rather than passive study. This “visible man” and “visible woman” have layers that can be pulled back to reveal the organs and the circulatory, nervous, and skeletal systems of the figures. To make the illustrations even more interactive, some flap anatomies included “dissectible” hearts and lungs that allowed the handler to completely remove them in order to get a closer look at these vital organs. Beneath the last flap of this illustration, there is text in Latin from the Wisdom of Sirach, an ancient religious text exalting the skill of physicians and reminding readers that healing comes from God.

Bernhard Siegfried Albinus, a Dutch-German anatomist, has often been compared to his predecessor Andreas Vesalius: both were known for their accurate illustrations based on firsthand observations of human cadavers in various states of dissection. Albinus’s structuralist approach to understanding the human body began with the skeleton, onto which muscles were overlaid, followed by viscera, the circulatory system, and nerves. Although well-respected for the accuracy of his work and scientific methodology, Albinus also believed in the concept of homo perfectus, an idealized form of the human body. Working with artist Jan Wandelaar on the illustrations for his famous Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corpopris humani, Albinus imbued his anatomical models with this idealized and decidedly non-objective beauty characterized by symmetry and vitality. 

Together, Wandelaar and Albinus also devised a new method of creating anatomical illustrations: A square-webbed net would be placed at regular intervals between the artist and the specimen so that the images could be copied using a grid, not unlike the techniques many muralists work to scale preparatory sketches to monumental proportions. Wandelaar’s artistry continued in the elaborate backgrounds he created for the cadavers, some even including Clara, an Indian rhinoceros who famously toured Europe between 1741 and her death in 1758. 

Robert Hooke has been referred to as an English Leonardo da Vinci in recognition of his extraordinary work as a scientist, natural philosopher, and architect. Micrographia represents Hooke’s pioneering work in microscopy, in which he became the first person to visualize a microorganism. His detailed illustration of a miniscule flea as seen under his microscope is among Hooke’s most famous contributions from this volume, but it also contains the illustration shown above, which accompanies the first known use of the word “cell” in a biological framework—an observation that would transform the Western understanding of the building blocks of life and set the stage for modern biology.. 

Hooke continues to influence artists and scientists today. Transdisciplinary artist Ingrid Bachmann, the International Artist-in-Residence for Healing, Knowing, Seeing the Body, created a series of sketches based on Hooke’s manuscript.

As a physician and photographer, Dr. Jon O’Neal was tasked with studying the bodies of HIV-positive individuals as part of one of the U.S. military’s first systematic studies of AIDS. O’Neal became fascinated with understanding how a supposedly ill body—one infected with HIV—could show no obvious external signs of disease. His photographs were taken in a makeshift studio set up in The Bonham Exchange, a nightclub in 1980s San Antonio, Texas. O’Neal’s anonymized, disembodied images encourage us to consider how seeing bodies can at once feel intimate—even voyeuristic—and impersonal. 

Healing, Knowing, Seeing the Body also includes works by Dr. Eric Avery, another physician and artist whose work addresses the 1980s AIDS epidemic.  

Heartbeats are physical and real; they are also ephemeral and fleeting. Recording a heartbeat as a pulse wave freezes a moment in time—a moment in a life—but before and after that moment, the heart beats on, the body it belongs to inevitably aging. The late 19th-century French physician and homeopath Charles Ozanam was the first to consider the relationship between heartbeats and aging, recording pulses from the newest infants to those who lived for more than a century, in the process creating what Robleto calls a “comparative time map of the human heart.” The delicate wave forms memorialized here represent the heartbeats of infants to ten-year-old children in 1886.