Art and Anatomy: Preserving and Exhibiting the Human Body

Illustrated lecture with Dr Corinna Wagner, University of Exeter
Date: Monday, May 5

Time: 8:00 PM
Admission: $8
Location: *** Offsite: Morbid Anatomy Museum (New Space) , 424 A 3rd Avenue (Corner of 7th Street and 3rd Avenue)
Presented by Morbid Anatomy

In this illustrated talk, Dr Corinna Wagner will investigate collaborations between artists and anatomists, from the late eighteenth century to the present day. We will look at the ways artists and anatomists shared a belief that by understanding the body’s interior, we may more fully understanding what it means to be human.

Two medical art forms in particular—wax anatomical models and écorchés (flayed bodies)—inspired debates over such questions as: how might seeing into the body change human identity? How would public access to wax anatomical models and preserved bodies change people’s views about ‘normality’ and ‘abnormality’? Did the spectacle of preserved bodies affect feelings of human compassion, sympathy and communality?

These types of questions have galvanized artists, writers, medical figures and the wider public in the past, and they continue to do so today. These issues may never be fully resolved; yet, as she will demonstrate, the spectacle of the body’s interior—as art, as medical illustration, as exhibit—has altered our ideas about human value, human distinctiveness and human identity.

Dr Corinna Wagner is Senior Lecturer is the English Department and the Department of Art History and Visual Culture at the University of Exeter, England. Her research and teaching focuses on the relationship between art, literature and medicine. She has just published two books: Pathological Bodies: Medicine and Political Culture (University of California, 2013) and Gothic Evolutions: Poetry, Tales, Context, Theory (Broadview, 2014). Currently, she is co-editing an anthology of poetry and medical writing, called Body of Work (Bloomsbury, 2015) and is finishing a book entitled Transparent Bodies: Medicine and Visual Technologies.

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