On the fabric of the human body in seven text-iles: The multimodality of learning anatomy

Abstract

When Andreas Vesalius made his now famous anatomical text De humani corporis fabrica libri septem (Latin for ‘On the fabric of the human body in seven books’), he attempted to address a crossmodal conundrum that continues to delight and perplex medical educators and learners to this current day: how to evoke the visceral, dynamic, friable, complex materiality of the human body in a shareable form, other than with flesh itself? In this Multimodal Sensations essay, I move beyond the often written about art of anatomy (e.g. Kemp and Wallace, 2000), to expand upon another aspect of anatomy and its education, written in Vesalius’ own series title – the fabric of the body. I draw on my, and my research team’s work, on the materials and artefacts of teaching sensory skills to medical students. Our field-sites were medical schools in Central and Western Europe and West Africa and our methods were ethnographic and historical, something I expand on further in the following section. This long-term project, called Making Clinical Sense, took sharing sensory knowledge as its driving methodology as