Death Becomes Her

Every student of anatomy has seen her. She's draped across the table, head cocked, lips parted, eyes closed, breasts bare, legs splayed. Death, a skeleton holding his staff, stands above her, static in an animated audience of physicians and their pupils. The woman is dead, her belly open and her womb empty, a flap of skin folded back by the man who holds our gaze and instructs us with a pointed finger.

He is Andreas Vesalius (1514–64) and the image is the title page of his De humani corporis fabrica, an epochal account of the anatomy of the human body complete with sumptuous engravings. Along with De revolutionibus orbium coelestium by Copernicus, also published in 1543, it marks a shift from medieval scholasticism to modern science. In the triumphalist history, Vesalius is the hero of modern human anatomy. When he was appointed as professor of surgery and anatomy at the University of Padua in 1537 he changed the way the subject was taught. For two centuries physicians had presided over anatomies, reading from Galen and instructing a surgeon to demonstrate the parts of the body. Vesalius took hold of the knife, and discovered that the bodies before him did not fit Galen's descriptions. Galen, he concluded, had worked from animals. A new account of human anatomy was needed. He conducted hundreds of dissections, recorded his observations in detailed drawings, and hired expert engravers to prepare the illustrations for his masterpiece. His book was the foundation of comparative anatomy and the beginning of scientific medicine.

Such stories belong to an age when the scientist was still seen as a master of objectivity. But bodies, as Michel Foucault has taught us, tell stories of power, violence, and subjectivity, and since Foucault histories of the body – the medical body, the criminal body, the black body, the female body – have charted the discursive formations through which power has been exercised. Evidence of actual practice, of embodied knowledge, is increasingly important to historians of science and medicine, but its traces have tended to elude the historical record. These splendid books by Katharine Park and Helen MacDonald put the anatomized body at the centre of the history of dissection. What, they ask, did it mean to open, anatomize and inspect a body? In answering this question both authors couple astute readings of visual images with the recorded evidence of medical and scientific practices.

The woman on Vesalius' title page had been executed in Padua sometime in the winter of 1541–2. According to the anatomist, she had been condemned to death for an unspecified crime. If she had been pregnant, as she had claimed, she would have won herself a temporary reprieve, but the midwives who examined her judged otherwise. On opening her body and displaying her empty womb, Vesalius confirmed this judgement. He also noted that she was very tall, middle-aged, and had had many children. No one knows for certain who she was, where she had come from, or what she had done to suffer this fate. She had been convicted of a capital offence, probably murder. She came from beyond Padua and its environs, as the university statutes that prescribed an annual public anatomy also proscribed use of the bodies of local people. Finally, she was executed in the winter months, when the air was cool and the university in session, and the judge approved the anatomist's request for the use of her corpse. Occasionally, the bodies of men met these conditions; women seldom did. Why, then, does Vesalius present this exceptional woman on his title page? She was no doubt intended to entice prospective buyers of the book, but she also serves as an emblem of a reformed anatomy. She is Vesalius's proof that he has surpassed Galen and mastered the secrets of women.

In ending, rather...