From the late eighteenth century to the present day, public exhibitions featuring displays of human anatomy have proven popular with a wide range of audiences, successfully marketed as educational facilities for medical professionals as well as improving entertainments for the general public. Partly a product of the public sanitation and health reform movements that began in the eighteenth century, partly a form of popular spectacle, early public anatomical exhibitions drew on two apparently distinct cultural developments: firstly, the professionalisation of medicine from the mid 1700s and the increasingly central role of practical anatomy within it; secondly, the rise of a culture of public spectacles such as world fairs, public museums, circuses and side shows, and the use of new visual technologies these spaces pioneered. Such spectacles often drew on medical discourses as a way of lending legitimacy to their displays of human bodies, while their popularity also helped make the then-contentious practice of anatomy publicly acceptable.
This book examines the cultural work performed by such exhibitions and their role in (re)producing new ways of seeing and knowing the body over the modern era. While public anatomical exhibitions might seem to occupy a marginal position in the history of popular culture and that of medicine, their distinctive intermixing of the medical and the spectacular has made them an influential and intensely productive cultural space, an important site of emergence for new ideas about bodily health and care. This book traces the influential role of such exhibitions in popularising a distinctly modern idea of the body as something requiring constant work and careful self-cultivation—an idea which continues to play a central role in the contemporary fascination with practices and possibilities of self-improvement. Through a series of representative case studies—including eighteenth-century exhibitions of anatomical Venuses, nineteenth-century anatomical museums “for men only” that served as quack clinics for sexual disorders, traditional and contemporary freak shows, and the recent public display of real human remains in Body Worlds and other such exhibitions—Anatomy as Spectacle traces how these exhibitions taught their spectators to see their bodies as something requiring constant self-monitoring and management, constructing an embodied modern subject who is always responsible, productive, temperate, and focused on self-improvement.
From the late eighteenth century to the present day, public exhibitions featuring displays of human anatomy have proven popular with a wide range of audiences, successfully marketed as educational facilities for medical professionals as well as improving entertainments for the general public. Partly a product of the public sanitation and health reform movements that began in the eighteenth century, partly a form of popular spectacle, early public anatomical exhibitions drew on two apparently distinct cultural developments: firstly, the professionalisation of medicine from the mid 1700s and the increasingly central role of practical anatomy within it; secondly, the rise of a culture of public spectacles such as world fairs, public museums, circuses and side shows, and the use of new visual technologies these spaces pioneered. Such spectacles often drew on medical discourses as a way of lending legitimacy to their displays of human bodies, while their popularity also helped make the then-contentious practice of anatomy publicly acceptable.
This book examines the cultural work performed by such exhibitions and their role in (re)producing new ways of seeing and knowing the body over the modern era. While public anatomical exhibitions might seem to occupy a marginal position in the history of popular culture and that of medicine, their distinctive intermixing of the medical and the spectacular has made them an influential and intensely productive cultural space, an important site of emergence for new ideas about bodily health and care. This book traces the influential role of such exhibitions in popularising a distinctly modern idea of the body as something requiring constant work and careful self-cultivation—an idea which continues to play a central role in the contemporary fascination with practices and possibilities of self-improvement. Through a series of representative case studies—including eighteenth-century exhibitions of anatomical Venuses, nineteenth-century anatomical museums “for men only” that served as quack clinics for sexual disorders, traditional and contemporary freak shows, and the recent public display of real human remains in Body Worlds and other such exhibitions—Anatomy as Spectacle traces how these exhibitions taught their spectators to see their bodies as something requiring constant self-monitoring and management, constructing an embodied modern subject who is always responsible, productive, temperate, and focused on self-improvement.
Dr Elizabeth Stephens is ARC Research Fellow at the University of Queensland. Selected previous publications: Queer Writing: Homoeroticism in Jean Genet’s Fiction. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009
A pleasure to read, this well-written book offers many thoughtful and provocative reflections on anatomy and exhibition and will appeal to a wide range of scholars concerned with disability, culture and medical history. Scholars from diverse disciplines will be interested in the material that Elizabeth Stephens traverses: wax Venuses, popular and educative anatomy museums, sideshow exhibitions of freakish bodies. Stephens engages with the literature on "spectacular" anatomy from a cultural studies perspective and offers an excellent entry point to a large and burgeoning multidisciplinary literature on a subject that continues to intrigue both scholars and popular audiences. Anatomy as Spectacle makes an important contribution to the history of science by underscoring the crucial place of cultural history within the discipline. Stephens's use of visual and material sources demonstrates the ways in which a close reading of these types of "texts" challenges received narratives about the professionalization of science. In Anatomy as Spectacle, Elizabeth Stephens traces the development, proliferation and changing significance of the anatomical exhibition (through museum cultures and the practices of certain anatomists and artists) from the early eighteenth century through to our contemporary moment. Her genealogy, while not exhaustive in its scope of analysis, calls attention to the complex, productive and peculiar intersections between popular anatomical exhibitions (such as the 'sexual health' museum, the 'freak show', displays of human waxwork figures) and the Western institutions of medicine. By extension, as a 'looping effect', Stephens argues that these intersections have helped transform the various discourses concerning human bodies that circulate in everyday social contexts. She fleshes out how medical and anatomical knowledge has been, and still is, appropriated outside the borders of the 'big' institutions (the 'spermattorhea' epidemic is a superb case in point). The book offers, in her words, a study of 'the role such exhibitions played in establishing anatomy as an increasingly respectable and important source of knowledge about bodies, and as sites in which audiences were explicitly trained to see and understand bodies in particular ways' (5). Thus, Stephens demonstrates how anatomy is not pure, truth-telling matter or a 'thing' whose meaning and value is ordained by 'scientific' objectivity, but in many ways a kind of spectacular technology, a thread of corporeal knowledge that is too difficult to disentangle from the multiple other threads - incorporations, if you will - that indeed go into building a body. Each chapter focuses on a specific exhibitory practice or site, and its broader social effects, in order to discuss the development of the modern, bourgeois notion of embodiment as a process of cultivation and maintenance of a self in good health. Anatomical exhibitions, Stephens suggests, have thus become a key component in the general project of understanding what bodies are and can do, and at once the dangers, diseases and variations to which they are potentially susceptible. These chapters - written mostly in a clear, pragmatic language that is often lacking in contemporary scholarly writing - raise questions concerning the gendering of anatomy (where the male body becomes the standard, hermetic subject), the discursive oscillation from 'freak' to 'disabled person' and the interpretative politics involved in seeing; that is, the contingency of the spectacle. One of the difficulties of this book, however, is that in providing quite a cornucopia of information Stephens seems to 'jump', usually subtly, from moment to moment, site to site, and this can have the effect of 'skimming' over some complicated terrain. This becomes particularly evident in her discussion of disabled embodiment and 'freak show' exhibitions, where the historical transformations - especially the individualising of impairment - tend to be glossed over. While this may be a tricky thing to avoid in any genealogy, as one must retain some humility of scope and style, the analytical weight of the arguments are left for the reader to determine on quite a few occasions. Moreover, Stephens is often at risk of over-citation insofar as the many and varied arguments and ideas she introduces into her book (especially from those supposedly always applicable scholars, Baudrillard and Foucault) are not necessarily given much traction through explanation. Again, this has the effect of 'skimming' or collapsing quite a few theoretical trajectories into one. In spite of this, Stephens has opened up a critical space - not entirely innovative but certainly anticipatory - to further research and discuss the connections between anatomical exhibitions, medical practice and body-discourses. While it is most interested in modalities of seeing, or how bodies are trained to look at anatomical exhibitions and interpret their objects, Anatomy as Spectacle, like most current scholarly literature, consolidates the primacy of vision at the expense of the other senses. If this is a book that is concerned with bodies that are not only knowledgeable but sensible I wager that, for instance, the inodorousness or non-tactility of the museum site (what does it mean for an audience to 'look but not touch'?) and how this 'ocularcentrism' structures and constrains our understandings of bodies, demanded some articulation. There is a hesitation to write against a world of semblances, signs, sights, spectacles, surfaces here, and perhaps for good reason. However, the confusion of bodies and technologies (in a word, somatechne) cannot simply be reduced to the ocular faculties - and this concrete relationship between seeing and thinking and doing - as there is more at stake. However, given the scope and inexorable constraints of the form, Stephens' Anatomy as Spectacle offers a fresh and engaging account of the budding, and indeed the wilting, of a historical nexus between exhibitory cultures and practices, medicine as a discipline that disciplines, and of course the maintenance, meaning and value of particular bodies in the everyday. It is well worth a read for scholars interested or doing research in fields such as disability studies, sensory studies, gender studies and indeed that spacious, noisy interval at which these are often drawn together: cultural studies. Stephens' Anatomy as Spectacle offers a fresh and engaging account of the budding, and indeed the wilting, of a historical nexus between exhibitory cultures and practices, medicine as a discipline that disciplines, and of course the maintenance, meaning and value of particular bodies in the everyday. It is well worth a read for scholars interested or doing research in fields such as disability studies, sensory studies, gender studies and indeed that spacious, noisy interval at which these are often drawn together: cultural studies.
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