The electronic vesalius: an experimental reorganization of disciplinary contents and contexts, in the reanimation of visual histories of anatomy

An interdisciplinary team at Rice University and the Texas Medical Center Library collaborated in the development of an atlas-of-anatomy-atlases centered around Andreas Vesalius’ 1543 Fabrica. As an installation piece, the finished product bridged the divides between physical and digital image-texts and disciplinary methods; but in the process of its development as a year-long project, it suggested that problems in one siloed field can be solutions in another, when viewed in a collaborative context. In this paper we lay out the materials, the contexts, the content, the collaborators, and the technologies that provisionally reorganized a portion of the visual history of anatomy in 2016, and suggest how this might be used to inspire future projects in the affordable reanimation of archival image-texts as museum interactives, as well as interdisciplinary collaborations more broadly.

A multidisciplinary team at Rice University collaborated with the Texas Medical Center Library’s rare book librarians to produce a combined digital/physical atlas of anatomy atlases, whose primary touch-sensitive interface was based on the fifth woodcut plate of muscles from Andreas Vesalius’ De Humani Corporis Fabrica, first published in 1543. This piece, installed in the library’s lobby, allowed visitors to physically interact with difficult-to-access objects from the rare book room’s extensive collection of pre-digital anatomy atlases. The project began out of a fascination with the medical humanities resources held in the library’s rare books room, which are only available to researchers under supervision. Because the medical humanities seek to broaden the conception of medicine beyond the narrowly biomedical, we thought that showing the history of anatomy across the library’s holdings in the entry room of a modern medical library could productively bring students out of their daily context. But as we worked with the primary source materials, the secondary scholarship, and the technological affordances of the media we used to build this interactive atlas, we found our goals evolving from bringing visitors to see the history of their field, toward a desire to bring that long history back to life and to allow it to say something that might be new, at least in the site-specific context of the installation. Our key methodological finding was that STS and engineering design are felicitously productive partners in the medium of critical making/design. This project’s impact registered in the domains of public communication, scholarly research, and pedagogy, as an installation piece, peer-reviewed publications, and inspiration for future projects. Through the process of constructing this hybrid interface, the team borrowed from past print and medical techniques as well as current electronics and digital media technologies. Moreover, the team generated new problems and solutions in the areas of interface design, interactivity, and digital history. Critically, the team modeled new ways for disciplines across the humanities/engineering divide to productively relate to each other, using critical making/design projects and workflows to pose and solve problems that the individual contributing disciplines would not be able to see let alone address on their own.