Katherine White

My dissertation applies methods for historicizing scientific sight and image creation to the visual epistemology of Early Modern anatomy as an entry for incorporating the medical cultures of the Spanish Empire into histories of surgery and dissection. It first surveys the medical-visual environment of 16th-century Europe that foregrounded Andreas Vesalius’ oft-cited 1543 De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septem, arguing for attention to analogous debates and visual materials concerning the body and human subjecthood emerging from across the Iberian world. These debates reveal mutually reinforcing interests in the evolution of bodily knowledge and its representation in print that extend past traditional centers for histories of Renaissance anatomy that privilege Italy. To situate this discourse in an environment heavily informed by expansion across the Atlantic, my dissertation further considers the circulation of Spanish interest in anatomy and representations of the body across the developing medical climate of the colonized Americas.