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Facsimile reprint of the 1698 first edition which was published in Delft and including an English translation by J. Jansen. Introduction, translation and facsimile. With portrait.
Facsimile reprint of the 1698 first edition which was published in Delft and including an English translation by J. Jansen. Introduction, translation and facsimile. With portrait.
The eighteenth-century practitioners of anatomy saw their own period as 'the perfection of anatomy'. This book looks at the investigation of anatomy in the 'long' eighteenth century in disciplinary terms. This means looking in a novel way not only at the practical aspects of anatomizing but also at questions of how one became an anatomist, where and how the discipline was practised, what the point was of its practice, what counted as sub-disciplines of anatomy, and the nature of arguments over anatomical facts and priority of discovery. In particular pathology, generation and birth, and comparative anatomy are shown to have been linked together as sub-disciplines of anatomy. At first sight anatomy seems the most long-lived and stable of medical disciplines, from Galen and Vesalius to the present. But Cunningham argues that anatomy was, like so many other areas of knowledge, changed irrevocably around the end of the eighteenth century, with the creation of new disciplines, new forms of knowledge and new ways of investigation. The 'long' eighteenth century, therefore, was not only the highpoint of anatomy but also the endpoint of old anatomy.
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From around 1650 until well into the nineteenth century, Frederik Ruysch enjoyed international fame as an anatomist. He owed his renown to a preparation method that greatly aided early-modern scientists in their exploration of the human body and transformed dissection from a messy business into a widely admired art. Ruysch’s anatomical collection was one of Amsterdam’s tourist attractions, for his embalmed bodies were astonishingly lifelike in appearance. The visitors who gazed with amazement at his preparations included the Russian tsar Peter the Great, who was so moved by the sight of an embalmed boy that he kneeled down to kiss him. The tsar later bought Ruysch’s entire collection and had all the specimens shipped to St Petersburg, where they still attract visitors from all over the world.