1.

Record Nr.

UNINA9910154606803321

Autore

Cunningham Andrew, Dr.

Titolo

The anatomist anatomis'd : an experimental discipline in Enlightenment Europe / / Andrew Cunningham

Pubbl/distr/stampa

London ; ; New York : , : Routledge, , 2016

ISBN

1-351-89494-3

1-138-24642-5

1-315-24140-4

Edizione

[1st ed.]

Descrizione fisica

1 online resource (468 pages) : illustrations, photographs

Collana

The History of Medicine in Context

Disciplina

611.0094

Soggetti

Human anatomy - History - 18th century

Enlightenment

Lingua di pubblicazione

Inglese

Formato

Materiale a stampa

Livello bibliografico

Monografia

Note generali

"First published 2010 by Ashgate Publishing"--t.p. verso.

Nota di bibliografia

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Nota di contenuto

1. 'This awful subject' -- 2. 'Merit is sure of its reward' : careers and courses -- 3. Experimental anatomy and its sub-disciplines -- 4. Human bodies : getting, keeping, picturing, publishing, arguing -- 5. Animal bodies and comparative anatomy -- 6. The end of old anatomy.

Sommario/riassunto

The eighteenth-century practitioners of anatomy saw their own period as 'the perfection of anatomy'. This book looks at the investigation of anatomy in the 'long' eighteenth century in disciplinary terms. This means looking in a novel way not only at the practical aspects of anatomizing but also at questions of how one became an anatomist, where and how the discipline was practised, what the point was of its practice, what counted as sub-disciplines of anatomy, and the nature of arguments over anatomical facts and priority of discovery. In particular pathology, generation and birth, and comparative anatomy are shown to have been linked together as sub-disciplines of anatomy. At first sight anatomy seems the most long-lived and stable of medical disciplines, from Galen and Vesalius to the present. But Cunningham argues that anatomy was, like so many other areas of knowledge, changed irrevocably around the end of the eighteenth century, with the creation of new disciplines, new forms of knowledge and new ways of investigation. The 'long' eighteenth century, therefore, was not only the



highpoint of anatomy but also the endpoint of old anatomy.