As architectural images became vehicles for natural philosophical thinking and practices, they also challenged certain conventions of architectural design. Dietterlin’s Architectura upended enduring principles of architectural naturalism and stability promoted in Leon Battista Alberti’s De re aedificatoria by developing a genre of amorphous ornaments that resembled the internal forms of the human body while effacing the conventional distinctions between architectural structure and surface, interior and exterior. Dietterlin derived these corporeal ornaments from empirically oriented images such as anatomical flap prints and the woodcuts of Vesalius’s De corporis fabrica. As architects and artists in northern Europe adopted the Architectura’s anatomical ornaments, they revealed the limits of architectural naturalism. Paradoxically, the waxing role of architectural images as tools for studying and embodying nature destabilized architecture’s long-standing traditions of naturalistic design.

The pupil allows light to enter the human body. Without the pupil, the human brain would not have an accurate representation of the world. The structure of the eye next to and behind the pupil is described in this chapter. It will emphasize that the pupil is not actually an anatomical structure, but is formed by the arrangement of two muscle groups that embryologically are part of the brain.

In the sixteenth-century Lutheran university, anthropological studies related the human as a microcosm analogically to the world as a macrocosm. The great chain of being dictated hierarchies corresponding to parts of the human body, forms of knowledge, and cosmic structure. Major claimed to found a new anthropology that spurned analogy and related the human to nature through experiment. He set experimental anthropology as the basis for the entire encyclopedia of arts and sciences because human cognitive processes shaped all knowledge. Major first exhibited his anthropology in a public human dissection in 1666. He deployed it against both academic and Rosicrucian views of the microcosm such as those maintained by his nemesis Johann Ludwig Hannemann. He also countered profit-driven arguments about humans. Having already argued in 1665 that the anatomist could correct Biblical interpreters’ views of black skin, he orchestrated in 1675 a public human anatomy of a Black woman, which was the first anatomical study of skin pigmentation. His colleague, Johann Nicolaus Pechlin, performed the dissection, arguing against Hannemann that skin color offered no justification for the slave trade.

Cervantes’s novel Don Quixote has exerted a unique influence on the history of the novel, because it tests, more exhaustively than any other, the bonds that tie fiction to the world that it partly invents.

This essay argues that the work of J. M. Coetzee is shaped, to a significate degree, by his long dialogue with Cervantes, which turns around a critical examination of what is here called the ‘anatomy of realism’ – the capacity of realist works of art to enter into the structuring of our life worlds. Coetzee’s engagement with Cervantes can be felt throughout his writing career, but it comes into particularly sharp relief in his later work, and particularly in his 2013 novel The Childhood of Jesus. It is in this work, the essay argues, that Coetzee’s reanimation of Don Quixote is most productive, as it reaches towards a dramatically shifted conception of realism, and of the relation between the imagination and the world.

Chapter 5, building directly on the impasse of Hamlet’s inaction, looks to Henry Chettle’s The Tragedy of Hoffmann and Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedy in exploring how these near-contemporary plays react to Hamlet’s existential impasse and tragic theatrical deficiency. The chapter especially attends to how Chettle and Middleton translate Shakespeare’s ethics of ‘marking’ into a wild exploration of the transgressive limits of moral being on the margins of what remains, once the performance of action leaves behind it a ruined and malformed metaphysics of morality. They do so by re-focusing the genre’s theatrical energy on multiple acts of violent revenge and transgression, paradoxically framed by a moral idealism often on the verge of tipping into frantic paranoia. As this chapter finally shows, the emerging actorly agency explored in these plays bears surprising consequences for how their imagined audiences are asked to understand and experience the passions attending the revenge act.

The Murder Act of 1752 imposed post-mortem dissection as the primary punishment for all people convicted of that crime. Recent historians have viewed this statute as strikingly regressive. In fact, its purposes and effects were notably humane. It dramatically reduced the number of dissections imposed on criminal bodies in London. By almost entirely confining dissection to murder alone, it substantially ended riots at executions. And, in ensuring a legal supply of “subjects” to anatomists, it helped make surgery as swift as possible in an age before reliable anaesthesia. On the other hand, public anatomization of dead killers was so uncommon that it seems likely to have inspired fascination rather than deterrent horror. And, in failing to supply enough “subjects,” the Act inspired epidemical levels of grave robbery, finally coming undone when enterprising monsters resorted to murder itself in meeting the needs of anatomists, who now seemed complicit in such crimes.

This chapter explores Galen’s ideas concerning the digestive-nutritive process. It focuses on his explanation of the motion of nutritive matter from its ingestion as food through its alteration into blood until its complete assimilation to the different body parts. The discussion follows its path inside the body from the mouth to the individual parts and describes the changes it undergoes in its different anatomical ‘stations’ and by what means it moves through these ‘stations’. In so doing it brings to light a fundamental but generally overlooked part of the digestive-nutritive process in Galen, namely physical motions of the parts such as the oesophagus, stomach and intestines. The chapter shows how these motions of contraction and extension actively and ‘mechanically’ move the nutritive matter into and through the body by pulling, pushing and compressing the parts of the body and the matter they hold inside them.

In 1831, Anne Lister wrote that she ‘found distinctly for the first time’ her own clitoris. This culminated a search of at least eleven years, involving much exploration of her own and her female lovers’ anatomy. Of course, her explicit diaries made clear that she touched her own and her lovers’ clitorises, but she was not able to link her own sensations with the anatomical terms she found in textbooks. By looking at Lister’s quest to find the clitoris, we can understand in more detail how difficult it was for women to conceptualise this important part of their bodies. If Anne Lister, a brilliant, erudite woman very knowledgeable about science and anatomy, and very sexually experienced with women, took so long to figure it out, it must have been much more difficult for ordinary women. The most startling aspect of how discourses could affect perception was that Lister spent ten years confusing the clitoris with the cervix, leading to fruitless explorations of her own body and those of her lovers. This chapter will thus contribute to the larger historiography about the history of the clitoris - when it appeared in anatomical books, and when some medical texts started to downplay or omit it.

This chapter examines the contributions that research in zoos has made to zoology. Much of the research conducted in zoos is concerned with the biology of captive animals. However, zoos can also be used to study the basic biology of little-known species and those that are difficult to study in the wild because they are very rare, difficult to find or for some other reason. Many of the early anatomical studies were performed on animals that died in zoos. In addition, zoo studies have included work on animal physiology, genetics, ecology, evolution, behaviour, animal personality and cognition. Some zoos have built specialist research facilities that allow carefully designed experiments to be conducted in controlled conditions in facilities integrated into exhibit designs.

This chapter proposes solutions to some longstanding problems surrounding the anthropogony of On Flesh. First, it shows how the author’s three main principles of the hot, the cold, and the wet reflect widely attested beliefs about the effects of heat and cold on bodily fluids. After that, it argues that the author’s two supplementary principles of the “fatty” and the “glutinous” are derived from a traditional dichotomy between bile and phlegm. The upshot of these observations is that the author of On Flesh uses the microcosm of the body as a tool for understanding the macrocosm of the universe. For this author, the natural world is primarily a reflection of the body (not the other way around), and it is specifically medical knowledge that gives him insight into the cosmos. Just as Eryximachus claims to have acquired his awareness of the universal power of eros “from medicine, our art” (ἐκ τῆς ἰατρικῆς, τῆς ἡμετέρας τέχνης, Pl. Smp. 186a), so the other cosmological doctors viewed medicine as a privileged starting point for contemplating the universe as a whole.

Speech is anatomy made audible. Anatomy influences the possible human phonetic repertoire. Speech is an overlaid function, in the sense that all the “organs of speech” have more basic functions. Speech anatomy is divided into regions: supraglottal, the larynx, and subglottal organs. Subglottal organs are restricted to those that create a pulmonary breath stream for speech. The larynx produces a tone called voice, which is fundamental to speech production. The supraglottal organs comprise primarily the tongue, lips, and velopharyngeal port (soft palate). These vary the possible resonance frequencies, and thus contribute in a fundamental way to the variety of sounds typically generated in speech. The surface of the tongue is divided into regions for the purpose of phonetic classification. Speech production involves many individual muscles; muscles pull but do not push, except in the sense that, if a muscle contracts over its primary dimension, it will bulge on the sides. To produce speech sounds, the tongue often arches in the middle, and it often assumes a position with the tongue tip raised or curled back.

Matthew Mangold provides a detailed overview of Chekhov’s medical education, tracing Chekhov’s writerly formation in light of the environmental approach to medicine emerging at the time in the areas of hygiene, anatomy, and psychiatry, and in the new connections that were being conceived between the outer material world and the life of the psyche.

This chapter tackles Galen’s minor anatomical works and the role of dissection in his oeuvre. It begins with his account of these works and then addresses them in roughly chronological order. Each section describes a text or pair of texts and evaluates the role of dissection within them, particular attention being given to lost texts in order to provide the fullest details possible. On the Dissection of the Uterus comes first. Next, the lost, original iteration of Anatomical Procedures receives extensive analysis, with a reconstruction of its contents. On the Dissection of the Dead (Arabic only) and On the Dissection of the Living (lost), On Controversies in Anatomy (lost), and On the Difference between the Homoeomerous Parts (Arabic only) follow. Next, the better-preserved works for beginners, On Bones, On the Dissection of the Veins and Arteries, and On the Dissection of the Nerves, and the more sophisticated On the Dissection of the Muscles are considered. After a brief description of his works dedicated to others’ anatomical output, the chapter concludes with the role that Galen allocates to dissection in his oeuvre, with particular attention to On the Usefulness of the Parts.

This is the introduction to the volume as a whole. It opens by considering Apuleius’ claims to dissection as evidence for a widespread interest in anatomy and dissection in the ancient world, particularly in the Roman period. It goes on to define the terms dissection and anatomy as used throughout the book and to lay out the overarching subject and aims of the project, while situating it within existing literature related to the topic. It particularly seeks to highlight the prevalence and importance of animal dissection, as opposed to the much rarer instances of human dissection, and to emphasize the pivotal role of the Roman period, which has often been underplayed in favor of the Hellenistic period. It concludes with an overview of the structure and contents of the book.