Human Anatomy: Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today; Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories

Human Anatomy: Depicting the Body from the Renaissance to Today

Thames and Hudson £17.95, pp 344 ISBN 0 500 51299 X

Rating: Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories

Yale University Press £19.99/$35, pp 224 ISBN 0 300 11699 3

Rating: I t is almost easy to forget, in this age of molecular biology, the central roles that anatomy and pathologic anatomy have played in medical science for the past four and a half centuries. Most histories of medicine deal with anatomy in brief and concentrate only on Andreas Vesalius, who, in 1543 published De Humani Corporis Fabrica , in which he dealt a severe blow to Galenic theories about the structure of the human body. Two new books have human anatomy and dissection at their cores, while addressing different facets of the history of anatomy.

Art meets anatomy in Human Anatomy , while Human Remains deals with the links between anatomy and anthropology. The first sentence of Human Anatomy is "The body was never a free gift"-something that the author of Human Remains seems to question. The tale that Helen Macdonald unfolds is a classic story of man's inhumanity to man-even in death. She takes us back to 19th century London and Van Diemen's Land (as Tasmania, once a British colony, was then called), to a time when dissection was done as much for entertainment-and to obtain high social standing-as for science.

The shortage of bodies for dissection in England was met by using the bodies of murderers who had been hanged, or, as with Burke and Hare, by murdering people for the sole purpose of dissecting them. This changed, to some extent after 1832, with the introduction of a new law that regulated the use of bodies for dissection.

In Tasmania, where British law did not apply, there were more opportunities. Those unfortunate enough to die in exile or in poverty often had no next of kin to claim their bodies and were automatically sent for dissection. In addition, native Tasmanians were becoming extinct on the island, leading to a rush to gather as many specimens as possible because comparative anatomists believed that their bodies were likely to be different from those on the Australian mainland. This also gave doctors an opportunity to match their counterparts in England in making "contributions" to anthropology and science.

The Alder Hey incident, in which body parts from children who died were removed and stored without their parents' permission, and other similar incidents reveal the almost proprietory attitudes that doctors have had towards patients and their organs. Richard Selzer's term for pathologists-"specimen collectors"-would certainly apply to the medical practitioners described in Human Remains , especially to Dr Joseph Barnard Davis, with his collection of 1474 human skulls. Reading this book, it comes as an unpleasant shock to learn how long this has been going on and how low some people have stooped to collect body parts in the supposed interests of science. MacDonald believes, rightly, that understanding behaviour in the past is crucial to our approach to current day events.

Credit: BRITISH MUSEUM PD V 1-33, HIND 1.191 HERITAGE PARTNERSHIP Just before Vesalius, the Renaissance in art and culture had begun in Europe. The explosion in art required artists to understand the human form intimately. As artists improved their knowledge of human anatomy for art's sake, surgeons and physicians did so for the purpose of saving lives. Rifkin, Ackerman, and Folkenberg (an art dealer, assistant director for high performance computing and communications at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, and freelance journalist, respectively) collaborate to produce a handsome volume, Human Anatomy , which traces the representation of the human body from the Renaissance to the modern day. One of the first images, appropriately, is that of Antonio Pollaiuolo's Battle of Naked Men (called Battle of Ten Nude Warriors in the book). Pollaiuolo was the first artist, in 1472, to dissect the human body in order to better understand the muscles and the nude form.

The book includes reproductions from the works of many artists, including Leonardo da Vinci (but not the Vitruvian man, now made famous by Dan Brown). The illustrations of a gravid uterus by William Smellie and William Hunter and those from Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical by Henry Gray stand out as classics. There is also information on the lives of many anatomists but, disappointingly, no portraits of any of these creative scientists.

Pathologic anatomy is included. There are paintings by Robert Carswell of the spinal cord in the condition later termed multiple sclerosis, as well as cirrhotic livers and aortic aneurysms, doing justice to William Osler's statement, "These illustrations have, for artistic merit and for fidelity, never been surpassed."

While the book ends with the US National Library of Medicine's Visible Human Project ( www.nlm.nih.gov/research/visible/visible_human.html ), it would have been fitting to have mentioned the controversial Body Worlds exhibition from Gunther von Hagens. (see BMJ 2001;323: 698). This was included in Human Remains : Helen MacDonald begins her book with the story of the public performance of an autopsy by von Hagens in 2002, to illustrate how morbid anatomy still fascinates and occasionally repulses us.