 This film is part of a feature in the journal British Art Studies that looks at Victorian anatomical atlases in relation to examples illustrated and authored by the surgeon, anatomist and artist Joseph McLeese. In this film, William Schupack, lead librarian and curator at the Welcome Library in London and LaBmilla Giordanova, an expert in the visual and material cultures of science and medicine, discuss the advent of large-scale lithographic anatomical prints, McLeese's influences and predecessors, and Richard Quains, the anatomy of the arteries of a human body, which McLeese illustrated, and McLeese's own surgical anatomy. Alongside the prints and publications themselves, they explore aspects of production and format, as well as visual style, vividness and detail, highlighting what made McLeese's illustrations unique and how they circulated internationally. And this is an example of one of the first sets of large lithographic anatomical prints published by Friedrich Tiedemann in the 1820s. The anatomy was invented in Munich in 1798 and quickly became popular because it was much cheaper and easier than line engraving. You can see the grain of the stone on which it's drawn, but it was very difficult to print these in colour, and so the red of the arteries would have been applied by hand in watercolour. And that's done by artisans, I think some of whom were women, perhaps working in their own home. There seemed to have been a production line of them, and so it was quite suitable for a cottage industry. But this is still quite big. So how do we envisage this was actually used? These were published in portfolios with a separate text. We know from pictures of anatomy theatres that big prints like this were pinned up on the walls and also in schools, anatomy schools, in universities. And this one is in good condition. Some of them would have shown signs of wear, and I think that's so interesting when we can see signs of wear, whether in bindings or in the prints themselves. Immediately before Mccleese published his 1841 anatomy of the arteries, the same publishers, Taylor and Walton, had produced a series of anatomical plates which were far less ambitious. And by comparing this print by artist called Walsh with Mccleese's, one can see that his are far more dramatic and far more demonstrative and would have had far more impact. These kinds of comparisons enable us to think really in detail about the plates, to look at the technique, to look at the kind of way the body is framed, to think about the actual mechanical quality of the lithography. The people we've been talking about were part of European networks, and France is a great centre for anatomical and medical work in the period that we're thinking about here, that is the 18th and especially into the 19th centuries. Yes, Joseph Mccleese had studied in Paris, and he would have been familiar with this set of prints that was produced by Jean-Marc Bourgerie and N.H. Jacob in the 1830s with very fine lithographs, which he himself would have emulated. Do we know anything about how closely involved the anatomist was in producing a work like this? It was produced by a team. Jacob and Bourgerie worked together for a long time. And this is one of, I think, about 10 volumes. It's a huge publication, much bigger than anything that Mccleese ever produced. This covers the whole of anatomy. Mccleese tends to concentrate more on the anatomy that would be useful to surgeons, arteries and other things that might be exposed in an operation. There were four brothers who came from Cork in Ireland to London in 1830s and 40s. The brothers Quain, Jones Quain and Richard Quain, who both became professors of anatomy at University College. And the brothers Mccleese, Daniel Mccleese and Joseph Mccleese. Daniel Mccleese was a painter. Joseph Mccleese was an artist and a surgeon. And they all lived in this area where in now Bloomsbury and Fitzerovia. The Quains as professors at UCL, Daniel Mccleese and Joseph Mccleese living just off Fitzroy Square. This is the anatomy of the arteries by Joseph Mccleese and one of the Quain brothers. The Quain brother was the anatomist and Mccleese was anatomist and artist. And it was produced in two volumes in 1841, published by the new firm of Taylor and Walton of Gower Street in London. The publishers to University College London where both Quain and Mccleese had studied. I'd like to think a little bit about the visual effects here because they are really quite distinctive. For a start, we've got ancillary material. And one of the things that strikes me is this artery. It looks quite mechanical. It doesn't look to me particularly organic. It's very precisely delineated. Yes, this is definitely a dead person. So this isn't a pulsing artery. The whole purpose of the book was to make the arteries really prominent so that people who had studied this plate would, for the rest of their lives, when they were conducting a surgical operation, they would never cut an artery because that was the most disastrous thing they could do. That was pretty well the end of the operation. But still, it's a naturalistic depiction of a human head. And this considerable skill, it seems to me, in getting these unusual angles and making them look convincing. What do we think about the production qualities of a work like this? This work has one quality which I think Mccleese didn't like, which was that it was issued in two small volumes. And so the plates had to be folded. When they came to do a second edition, which was in 1844, the work was produced in one vast volume in which the plates were not folded. They were mounted. And so you get a much more striking effect from the unfolded plates. The problem being that the resulting volume was so heavy and unreadable that a separate volume of text had to be issued, which is octavo size. So a very small book. And we're looking here at the explanation for the plate that we have in front of us here. That seems to be pretty important to imagine that someone could hold an octavo volume, could check out the ABC and so on, and have the book actually in front of them, although this one does look in pretty pristine condition. Yes, I think it's in a uniform binding. So you would buy them at the same time and perhaps spend a lot of time leafing through this and only consult that when you wanted to know what a particular organ was. So what did he actually do to make these illustrations? Some of the title pages say, Drawn on Stone by Joseph MacLeese. He drew on the lithographic stone, a big stone slab the same size as the plates. He may have copied from an earlier drawing on paper that he had done. I suspect that would be the case. So at University College Hospital or at one of the French hospitals where he studied, La Petitie, for example, he probably did drawings on paper. And then for Taylor and Walton, the publishers, and for the Quain, who was his co-author, he will have redrawn them on the slab. And then somebody, usually Hull-Mendell, but sometimes Groff, these are professional lithographers, will have taken the slab, inked it, and printed it, probably in black and white, and then somebody else would have colored them by hand. Because he understands the techniques. I mean, that seems to me such an interesting transition. He's a professional surgeon as well as an artist. So he's got a foot in both camps, so he can do these things. But as you say, most people who produced anatomical publications couldn't do that. They worked as part of a team. This image that we've got here is particularly interesting. It may be helpful for him to have the arm held up in order to show the blood vessels moving from the arm into the torso. But there's a considerable amount of detail that McLeese has added. And given what we know about the production techniques, we have to assume that he was being completely deliberate when he was doing this. Yes, the hooks and the chains and the cords, all paraphernalia of the anatomy school. And he's not trying to show the cadaver as being alive, which is what some anatomists did. He's emphasizing that it is a cadaver that he's working from. The hairstyle is presumably characteristic of the time, but of course it could be read as a generic, classical, simple man's hairstyle. And then there are these details like around the nipple, where we can see the individual hair follicles. Yes, that doesn't seem to be necessary in order to show surgeons where the arteries are, but it adds to the vividness of the picture. This is Joseph McLeese's surgical anatomy. This was produced in 1851. And by this time, he had left Gower Street in University College and had joined up with a big West End publisher called John Churchill. They are hand-colored. This is the original London edition produced by John Churchill. And this is an edition produced in Philadelphia shortly afterwards, but not with all the same plates. The difference between the London and Philadelphia editions of these books is that the London edition includes this plate with the white man and the black man. Whereas in the Philadelphia edition, the black man is omitted. We're noticing, aren't we, that these books are available in many different forms. And this is a redrawn version produced in North America. Yes, this is published in Boston. The figures are from McLeese and he is credited. The plates of McLeese's surgical anatomy. But the technique is completely different. Rather unusually, the printer has decided to use red for the viscera and organs, which red is normally used for the arteries. So he can't use red for the arteries. So he's introduced this orange instead, which I think is an artificial orange. And blue is used for the veins as usual. And he's also put some things in yellow. So much greater variety of tones. And this would have seemed very strange to people who are used to traditional coloring of anatomical atlases. And just the quality of the illustrations is, it's much cruder. It's done on a smaller scale. They are Baxter type prints, which could be printed in colors rather than colored by hand. We might want to notice the format and the binding. It shows real signs of use. This seems to be much more characteristic of the working book. Yes, this will be original publisher's cloth binding. And R.U. Piper, MD, presumably of Boston, was the person who produced it. This is the Philadelphia edition of Joseph McLeese's Surgical Anatomy. And we've got ownership marks of two earlier owners. One who describes himself as... I think it says Anderson, something, maybe even A. Anderson. A surgeon, second of the sixth rifle brigade. Kingston, Western Canada, 1851, which is year of publication. So we have a surgeon in Western Canada, which is a long way from Philadelphia, who has acquired this in the year of publication. From him, it later passed to the Royal Army Medical College Library, which was in Milbank. Traveling must be a theme here. Even if we go back to William Hunter, we can see that he was lecturing to people who came to study with him in London. These people are highly mobile, so anatomical knowledge is being transmitted actively through people moving across the Atlantic, in this case. And, of course, the images traveled, too, from the London editions of this book to Philadelphia and Boston and to Canada and to the world.