 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 Schupbach, lead librarian and curator of the Welcome Library in London, and LaMilla Giordanova, an expert in the visual and material cultures of science and medicine, discuss McLeese's intellectual influences and the broad cultural, political, theological and scientific environments in which 19th century anatomical texts disseminated knowledge about the human body. The broader context in which this is happening is one of considerable political turbulence. It was not uncontroversial to found University College, which was set up expressly not to be religious. And Jeremy Bentham was the leading utilitarian thinker of the time. Political reform is in the air. There are artisans forming groups to read and think about science and medicine. So the wider environment of anatomical production is really vital and it's not stable and secure and self-evidently respectable at all. Do you think an element of that was popularization and democratization of knowledge? Yes, absolutely. This is a very, very important part of the early 19th century. If we think about the kind of books that are being produced or even the original project of the Encyclopedia Britannica, it is to disseminate knowledge and this is to give working people, especially I think artisans, a much better hold on the natural world, which of course includes the body of man. Man is how this would have been understood in the period. That is the human race as an object of scientific and medical scrutiny. So this is work that Joseph MacLeese produced three years after his Anatomy of the Artes and this is on comparative osteology, being morphological studies to demonstrate the archetype skeleton of vertebrated animals produced by Taylor and Walton in North Gower Street, 1847. I'm very interested in several things here. One is the whole notion of comparison. So he's comparing bones. He's drawing on well-established comparative anatomy traditions by this point. We might think of someone like Cuvier in France who claimed that from a fragment of bone he could reconstruct the whole animal. The idea of laying out the whole of created nature so that we really understand the differences between animals that may for example look quite similar but not at all with an evolutionary mindset and I think we know that because he uses the notion archetype which is very characteristic of a particular type of comparative anatomy of the early 19th century and actually you find it in George Cuvier, the great French anatomist. So I think we're seeing something here which we might think, oh we know what this is about but I suspect we don't really know what it's about at all. It's a very different mindset than the one that comes in much later in the century in the wake of people such as Darwin. In the preface he names some of these people who he claims to be influenced by. Here is McLeese acknowledging his intellectual lineage and what's so interesting is that initially the names he mentions are French and German thinkers and he's also acknowledging of course other people who are important in comparative anatomy in England such as Richard Owen, the great comparative anatomist of his time. He mentions Baron Cuvier and Goethe and Joffre Saint-Hilaire, Lawrence Oaken, Carl Gustav Karras these are all big names in France and Germany. Filtered through William Sharpie, who is professor of physiology at University College London. Mr. Quain, so that would be Richard Quain and Richard Owen. So these people are philosophers, they're thinkers as well as being naturalists. Yes and in the last sentence he acknowledges Robert Grant, the founder of the Grant Museum at University College London but he's indebted to them because they point full to the theme of philosophical unity so he's looking at the anatomy of the body as a whole throughout the animal kingdom. So one of the larger contexts for this is what's called natural theology the idea that we can infer the presence of God from created works which is absolutely current in this period especially through what are called the Bridgewater Treatises which aim to demonstrate that claim that by looking at the created world we can see the hand of God one of which was written by the great surgeon and anatomist Charles Bell. So I think what we're actually doing here is trying to suggest the broad world in which anatomical publications exist and that world is not just about the techniques of printing and so on important though those are, it's not just about the world of medicine important though that is, it's also about much broader discussions about the place of human beings in the universe and the role of religion. It seems to me that there are a lot of questions that people are struggling with in this period and one is how to explain the variety of human beings that are now known to exist in the world it might be worth remembering that by this period all the main continents have been discovered given that Australia is now part of people's imaginary in the second half of the 18th century so people are struggling to explain human difference. Here's one pretty striking comparison with a man and a woman side by side we haven't seen that many women. This is about surgery of the axilla or the armpit a lot of Macleese's work was with surgery of the groin particularly because a lot of surgeons had to do operations for hernia and so that was how that was involved. He seems to have only shown a woman where there was some necessary difference like the breast makes the innervation different so if he's carrying out an operation for some form of extirpation of some tumor or cancer or something like that the surgeon would need to know how the arteries and veins enter and leave the breast. I think people would be quite familiar with the idea that you make comparisons all the time between the bodies of babies, children, men, women, people of different races as well as comparing humans with animals that look similar to them but are possibly not related in the mindset of people in the early 19th century. Macleese hasn't tried to produce a kind of gender neutral figure as some even contemporary with us contemporary anatomical illustrators do he's definitely showing the men as men and the women as women. Yes, with very obvious musculature as well. So I think this is a period when there's a lot of medical interest between men and women. A lot of medical writing about what is it that makes women different and certainly in the late 18th, early 19th centuries a lot of interest in that as a whole body problem if you like it's not just about the anatomy, it's about the entire physiology about the nature of the nervous system. So it's a way of exploring the natural dimensions of differences that we tend to see as much more social and constructed. This is art historically interesting because it's art because it's made by artists, because it's made by people who are in constant interaction with people that we think of as important players in the art world. There's no point at which there's a separation I think. William Hunter collected paintings by Sharda. He knew Alan Ramsey, the great Scottish 18th century artist. The art world of the 18th and 19th centuries brought artists, medical people, natural philosophers, engravers, sculptors, printers, publishers and so on together. The anatomists drew what they wanted from the art world. They wanted engravers, they wanted draftsmen, they wanted colorists, they wanted publishers, they wanted bookbinders. All these people are artists and the anatomists are artists too. They're doing a kind of sculpture. They're exposing what they want to expose and concealing what they want to conceal. I prefer to talk about the arts rather than art to the capital A. So that there are the arts of engraving, the arts of lithography, the arts of limning, the arts of drawing and so on. All these arts are displayed in abundance in all these magnificent anatomical works.