Beyond the "Book" of Nature: Putting Pictures in their Place in Systems of Anatomical Visual Displays

Time: 12:00 - 1:00 p.m.

Place: 6th Floor Conference Room, Chemical Heritage Foundation

Information: 215-873-8289 or bbl@chemheritage.org

Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- century anatomy depended upon a variety of visual displays. Drawings in books, particularly beautiful and elaborately illustrated books that have been the objects of historians' fascination, were limited in their circulation. These illustrations were understood to function alongside chalk drawings done in classrooms, casual and formalized experience with animal and human corpses, text describing or contextualizing the images, and preserved specimens. This system of visual displays was used both in the development of new knowledge and in the teaching and conveying of established knowledge.

Historians have attempted to understand the relationships between representations and knowledge, between seeing and knowing, by extracting books from that system of visual displays, looking at images and illustrations in isolation as the objects of study, representative of classes of things. In so doing, they have granted a primacy to elegant and beautiful books of the sort that are recognizable as the medium for knowledge to our modern eyes, but that risks denying the significance of a context of use during the period.

This talk argues that the constellation of visual displays used by anatomists defies categorization into the neat and naturalized dichotomies of nature and representation and of representation (image) and knowledge (text), dichotomies that are themselves modern. Drawings from books cannot be removed from the system of visual displays without fundamentally misunderstanding their use.

Carin Berkowitz is associate director of the Beckman Center at CHF. She received her Ph.D. in science and technology studies from Cornell University in 2010, with a dissertation entitled “Medical Science as Pedagogy in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain: Charles Bell and the Politics of London Medical Reform.” She was the recipient of the American Association for the History of Medicine’s 2010 Shryock Medal and spent 2009–2010 as a Philadelphia Area Center for the History of Science writing fellow.