By Dr. Allen Shotwell
The Man & His (Hybrid) Text
In 1545, the French physician Charles Estienne published his De dissectione partium corporis humani, an illustrated anatomical text that has always occupied an awkward place in the history of medicine, beginning with its chronology.
Although it appeared two years after the famous Fabrica by Andreas Vesalius, much of De dissectione was written well before. As Estienne noted at the beginning of the text, publication had been held up by a lawsuit from his partner in writing the text, the surgeon Estienne de la Riviere (Estienne).
Yet another strange aspect of the text is how its various illustrations were produced. Estienne’s anatomical images were the result of a combination of recycled images and modified woodcut blocks that has fascinated more than one historian. A member of a prominent family of printers, Estienne reveals his familiarty with the printing process in De dissectione. This especially obvious in the text's illustrations, some of which were produced by borrowing from other works (a common method used by early modern printers to reduce overhead).
The most famous examples in De dissectione are the images originally used in a renaissance
work on erotica and later appropriated by Estienne for his anatomical work. As Bette Taalvacchia has discussed, Estienne modified the erotic images by cutting out pieces of the block used in printing them, and then inserting a new piece with the appropriate anatomical detail (Taalvacchia). The effect is visible in the faint outline of the removed piece, apparent in the final printed image (see images). Needless to say, this combination of erotica and anatomy is an intriguing one with ramifications that stretch beyond the history of medicine.
Hybrid Anatomical Practice
Coinciding with the appearance of Estienne’s book was male practictioners' intensified
dominance in women’s medicine; this, by the end of the century, would lead to the final exclusion of what little female authority lingered in the field (Green Making 246). How much experience a physician like Estienne would have had with actual women’s bodies and childbirth is a matter of conjecture; many anatomical authors had very limited experience with female bodies, even less with pregnant women, and virtually none with fetuses. The Italian surgeon, Berengario da Carpi complained he was unable to examine human fetuses with any regularity, and his solution was to turn to pregnant dogs (Berengario 259v).
Fetal puppies and pregnant dogs were regular substitutes for human women and fetuses in the sixteenth century, and a wide variety of anatomical authors reference their usage. Vesalius famously made study of fetal dogs in his discussions in the Fabrica and was quickly called to account by Realdo Colombo for it, although Colombo made a similar use of dogs (Shotwell 2012). Estienne was clear that animals were acceptable substitutes for humans, making his efforts at illustrating and describing women’s bodies and women’s medicine even more striking.
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Dr. Allen Shotwell is a professor of Liberal Arts at Ivy Tech Community College in Indiana.
References:
Images: National Library of Medicine. “Historical Anatomies on the Web”. Web. 7 January 2015.
Estienne, Charles. De dissectione partium corporis humani libri tres, Paris, 1543.
Berengario da Carpi, Jacopo. Commentaria cum amplissimis additionibus super anatomia Mundini una cum textu eiusdem in pristinum et verum nitorem redacto. Bologna, 1521.
Green, Monica. Making Women’s Medicine Masculine. Oxford:Oxford University Press, 2008.
Shotwell, R. Allen. “The Revival of Vivisection in the Sixteenth Century”, Journal of the History of Biology, 45(3), 2012.
Talvacchia, Bette. Taking Positions. On the Erotic in Renaissance Culture. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999.