Anatomical Things: Introduction

Abstract

A natomy in medieval and early modern europe was a discipline in themaking. It did not enjoy the same authority as the field of medicine or the vocations of the physician or surgeon, even if anatomical knowledge was a part of such disciplinary training. Rarely if ever did one train to become “an anatomist.”This began to change with the late thirteenth-century revival of cadaveric dissection of humans, a practice envisioned but never fully realized by ancients like the Roman physician Galen of Pergamum (ca. 129– ca. 216 CE). From this century onward, anatomy emerged as a new field that contributed to knowledge of the body in important ways. Over the course of the early modern period, anatomy’s identity evolved into the experimental and descriptive scientific discipline that it became known as by the early nineteenth century, an important time in the institutionalization and professionalization of medicine that Michel Foucault has famously examined in The Birth of the Clinic (1973). At the same time that human anatomy emerged as a subject required to practicemedicine, surgery, andmidwifery, its study became