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ANDREA CARLINO, Paper Bodies: A Catalogue of Anatomical Fugitive Sheets 1538-1687. English translation by Noga Arikha. Medical History, Supplement 19. London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1999. Pp. xvi+352. ISBN 0-85484-069-9. $50.00 (hardback).
This handsome volume surveys a peculiar variety of early modern medical prints with flaps that open to reveal clearly defined organs. The very rare engravings were circulated independently as 'fugitive sheets' in the late Renaissance from the middle of the sixteenth century. They are less well known than much anatomical iconography. Building on the work of Ludwig Choulant, LeRoy Crummer and William Ivins, Andrea Carlino argues that they reveal a transformation of engraving from a pedagogic tool to a focus of popular interest. As he situates sixty-two surviving images within cultures of engraving, publishing and graphic design in a substantial introduction, Carlino reveals his fascination with such 'paper bodies'.
The demand for expert engravings of the body grew quickly after the institution of anatomy lessons at major European medical universities. Carlino directs readers both to the status anatomy gained within learned medicine and to the techniques that engravers used to reproduce first-hand knowledge of the body. The heroes of the introduction are two-fold: first, the anatomist Andreas Vesalius, who inaugurated anatomy as a study freed from 'constraint[s] upon the observation of the material, visible, tangible evidence' (p. 7) by using images to transmit medical knowledge; and second, the communities of engravers producing anatomical flysheets from the 1540s to the 1650s, whose work diffused multiple copies of anatomical images to a large audience other than medical physicians, allowing academic learning and interest in dissection to move apart. His argument examines the images as vehicles for popularizing medical knowledge, by emphasizing the visual basis of understanding first-hand observation of the body. In the manner that Vesalius' Fabrica marked 'a point of no return in the history of epistemology, education, and anatomical publishing' (p. 32), Carlino argues that a 'visual culture of anatomy' presented authoritative images of the practice of dissection through these fugitive sheets to later generations. The images' relation to Vesalius' work, or to the practice of dissection, is unclear. The author's suggestion that the tradition of anatomical illustration...