Timothy Kent Holliday // “Dying is an art, like everything else” (Plath 245). With these words twentieth-century poet Sylvia Plath alluded to her own suicidal ideation. Death wishes of a different kind entwined in cities like Philadelphia in the 1830s, a century before Plath’s birth: the dying dreams of a patient, and the nineteenth-century anatomist’s…
Tag: anatomy
Cutting: Traditions in anatomy and Thanksgiving
Yoshiko Iwai // The three of us go around the table to introduce ourselves, smiling under our masks and glasses, warming up our fresh scrubs. I had never met either of them before or even seen their faces through Zoom. A moment of silence passes. The guy across from me offers to hold the instruction…
Persons or Things? On the Ethics of Anatomical Dissection
Erik Larsen // “Open up a few corpses: you will dissipate at once the darkness that observation alone could not…” (Qtd. in Foucault 146). Xavier Bichat’s maxim, written in his Anatomie générale of 1801, described a new medical epistemology—one that informs medical practice and training to this day. Along with his Parisian colleagues, Bichat attempted…
Bentham’s Auto-Icon
Lesley Thulin // Jeremy Bentham, one of the founders of modern utilitarianism, has an old saw about pushpin. In The Rationale of Reward (1825), a treatise on the legislation of discipline, Bentham invokes the nineteenth-century tavern game to weigh the relative virtues of recreational activities and art. Framing the issue in the terms of his…
Animate Skeletons and Living Death: The Art of Vesalius’s Anatomical Science
Claire Litt // Medical sciences study the corporeal aspect of human existence. Since our species’s emergence as anatomically modern humans in the Middle Paleolithic era, we have shared an experiential knowledge of what it feels like to have the body of a Homo sapien as the sensual medium between the physical world and our inner lives….
Lecture recap: “The Whiteness of Bones: The Emergence of the Human Skeleton as a Commodity”
With Anita Guerrini, Heidi Hausse, and Pamela Smith The fall semester’s Explorations in the Medical Humanities series began with Professor Anita Guerrini (the Horning Professor in the Humanities and Professor of History at Oregon State University) on the subject of the human skeleton as a scientific, artistic, and artisanal object and commodity in early modern…