 This film is part of a feature in the journal British Art Studies that looks at Victorian anatomical atlases in relation to examples illustrated at Dorford by the surgeon, anatomist and artist, Joseph McLeese. In this film, William Schupack lead librarian and curator at the Welcome Library in London and LaMilla Giordanova, an expert in the visual and material cultures of science and medicine, discuss William Hunter's highly influential, large-scale atlas, the anatomy of the human gravid uterus exhibited in figures, published in 1774. Hunter was a Scottish physician who served as obstetrician to Queen Charlotte and was the first professor of anatomy at the Royal Academy of Arts in London. His illustrations of the anatomy of human pregnancy reflect the observations he made while dissecting bodies between the 1740s and 1770s. This film addresses the question, what is an atlas? And examines the way these objects were used into the age of photography. So William, this is William Hunter's amazing book. I think one thing we'll want to take on board is just the sheer scale of it and the specialness of the paper, the printer, the quality of the plates. It's a luxury production. It's printed in huge type in Latin and English. It's by the obstetrician to Queen Charlotte and it's dedicated to King George III. It's an aristocrat of obstetrical literature and print production. The prints were by French artists imported by William Hunter to display the finest engraving techniques and to apply them for the first time to obstetrics and childbirth. This print is by Sir Robert Strange. So although he was British, he'd spent most of his career in Paris doing prints after Guido Rainey and other 17th century painters. He'd learnt completely the French technique of engraving with all the highlights and the different types of hatching and so on. We really want to take note of all the details here, don't we? One of the things that strikes me about this is how he has the glistening of the umbilical cord so that you're really meant to feel that you're somehow present before a dissection. These are the lights coming through from the ceiling in William Hunter's Anatomy Theatre in Great Windmill Street in Soho in the 1760s and 70s. What's your sense of how masterful the workmanship is here? Extraordinary. The engravers were virtually slaves of William Hunter. He was a very hard task master but quality pays off in the end. But there is another side to this, isn't there? Because this doesn't quite convey the actual conditions under which dissections performed. Probably more squalid than the finesse of this production implies. William died in childbirth and Hunter had the use of their cadavers and the cadavers of the unborn babies. Rimsdick was commissioned to do red chalk drawings of these specimens before they decayed and became unusable. It is quite a violent image in some ways, I think, with the truncated thighs where you can see the inside of the woman's legs which don't connect directly with the main subject of the Atlas, which is fetal development. The use of this book then is that people would stand around and look at it, perhaps a little bit like we're standing around and looking at it now. It's not something that you're going to have by your side when you're performing a dissection. That's right, it's something for a library, for a large library and the plates could be kept in portfolios as well as in volumes. The text is in Latin and English to make it available to an international audience. So people in St. Petersburg and Paris and Berlin could read this as well as people in Great Britain. William, do you think we're tempted to call this an Atlas? William Hunter didn't call it an Atlas. He said it was the anatomy of the gravity uterus. In Latin, tabulis illustrata, illustrated with tables or in the English text exhibited in figures. The plates were called figures. The term Atlas had been applied to large books long before William Hunter. Mercator's Atlas, so-called in the 16th century, was named because it had an engraving of Atlas on the title page. After Mercator, it was used for books of maps in general and then applied from world of maps and geography to atlases of prints of birds or natural history in general or in this case anatomy. So one theme here is tracing the natural world and here we're mapping the human body, in this case the body of a fetus. And do you think it's that shared sense of looking in detail, gathering information of what's out there that makes us reach for the word Atlas? Certainly the incredible amount of detail in something like Mercator's Atlas which names towns and countries all over the world. That level of detail is applied in William Hunter's Atlas but books like this were not called atlases by their authors. They were called atlases by librarians and book dealers and booksellers who needed a word for them partly because paper of this size could be called Atlas size as distinct from small books which were Octavo or Corto productions. And something that's characteristic of this style of publication is an intricate relationship between words and images. We could invite people to note the use of letters. This is not original to Hunter. This was happening for centuries before Hunter did this. But it does mean that you're constantly moving your attention between a description and of course it's a double description because it's in English and in Latin and really quite a complex visual production. There is a very interesting preface to this book where he sets out what he thinks he's doing in this project and that also suggests to me something of the quality of thoughtfulness that he brought to this project. It's highly considered. It's highly considered but very difficult to read because the book is so huge. You would need to place this on a lectern to read it. It would need to be in some large library. It's not something you would consult. You would want a small handbook to consult. But that does fit with something we know about connoisseurship in this period which is the cultivation of careful acts of looking. Hunter was a connoisseur. He knew about careful looking. But it's possible to imagine people standing around as indeed you and I are doing here and talking and looking and turning the pages and experiencing the weight of the paper, the colour of the paper, the fine typography. I like that idea because it makes a quite concrete connection between the world of art and the world of medicine, the world of science, the world of books, the world of prints. Well, we're treating this a bit like a medieval choir book which is huge and it has big staves and notes big so that the choir can stand around it and all sing from it, literally sing from the same hymn sheet at the same time. So who is Hunter in conversation with? He came from Glasgow, studied in Paris, set up his anatomy school in London with his brother John Hunter and they later split up and then he ran it on his own. He was an art collector and connoisseur and everything that he did shows his connoisseurship and his education. Collecting Chardin the way he was painted by Alan Ramsey are all part of him configuring a new identity for himself where he is intellectual and polite and genteel and connoisseurial. One of the biggest challenges in doing this kind of work is to imagine how these productions were actually used. This is William Hunter's Anatomy School in Great Windmill Street in London and there's an anatomical dissection going on with students, medical students or other students all around and on the back wall we can see an array of watercolours and prints of anatomical subjects both animal and human. One of the things we're constantly trying to think about is what kind of social environments these were and once we move into the era of photography of course there's an enormous amount of material available for thinking about what people did, how they ritualised the anatomy room, how they presented themselves in a setting that was after all quite problematic. In this photograph we've got the remnants of a corpse. There's absolutely no attempt here to make it look polite, genteel, elegant in any way. We may assume that this is the head but perhaps not, maybe those are knees. So yes it must be because this must be the thorax here. So when I first looked at this I was momentarily disorientated as to which bit of the body was actually being looked at and what's wonderful here is we can see images just pinned up everywhere. This is an entirely visual world that they are inhabiting. Yes I think these are lithographs by George Vainarellis and Ford who also came from the University College London staple, also published by Taylor and Walton and they were the next lot after McLeese came out in the 1850s and they've all been removed from their portfolios and they have little pieces of string attached and they're all attached to nails on the wall. Students can turn around and see how Vainarellis and Ford, the two professors at UCL have represented structures which might well have been obscure in the actual canaver. I think this man is actually taking down some notes, is he, or doing some drawings? Or is that a scalpel he's got? He's got a book open. Yes, yes, yes. This is wonderful. Here is the book. And in fact I don't know what you think about the size of that book William. It's octavo-ish. Yes, yes it's a manual of dissection probably. In fact I think Vainarellis and Ford did publish a small book like that to go with the big planes. There's the book.