The Courtiers' Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV's Paris by Anita Guerrini (review)

At the centre of Anita Guerrini's book are dissections of animals and research into comparative anatomy in Paris during the reign of Louis XIV (1643–1715). As a cultural historian, Guerrini draws on the practices of dissection performed by Paris anatomists as well as the artistic and printing practices used to record and represent their activities. Her profound and rigorous study is based on original research and a wide range of printed and manuscript sources. Guerrini shows how dissection and comparative anatomy were key to the development of the experimental methods of the new science. But The Courtiers' Anatomists not only tells the story of the epistemic and moral value of animals and how they became an object of study in their own right. It is also a book about the rise of the new science and how royal and court patronage promoted unique ways of knowing in early modern France.

The first two chapters introduce the topography and themes of seventeenth-century Paris anatomy. They describe the sources for bodies (gallows, cemeteries, and hospitals) and the sites of anatomical teaching and dissection (the medical faculty, the company of surgeons, the Hôtel-Dieu, the royal gardens, salons, and academies). Guerrini also emphasizes the importance of anatomical textbooks as well as the impact of new theories on Paris anatomy, and sketches the networks of patronage that promoted new anatomical research and teaching. Opposed to the conservative medical faculty, the salons and court were sites of experimental anatomy already before the foundation of the Paris Academy of Sciences (Académie) in 1666 under the auspices of the minister of finance, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, and inspired by William Harvey's and Gaspare Aselli's work on circulation.

The animal projects of the Académie, epitomized by the Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire naturelle des animaux (Histoire des animaux, first published in 1671), are the focus of chapters three and four. Anatomy was established at the core of the Académie by one of its leading early members, Claude Perrault. He regarded anatomical dissection as the foundation of all knowledge on both the human and animal and gave observation priority over reasoning. With the constant supply of animals from the royal menageries at Vincennes and Versailles, the dissection of exotic beasts became an important focus of activity and provided the material for the Histoire des animaux. This grand folio and its illustrations reflected the singularity of their subjects rather than regularity in anatomy. It represented royal power and the French state and added to the prestige of the Académie as a learned society and a recipient of patronage.

The fifth and sixth chapters focus on the work of Claude Perrault and Joseph-Guichard Duverney, who became member of the Académie in 1674. Guerrini shows how anatomical work on visual and auditory perception related to literature and music in the Paris culture wars between ancients and moderns. In Perrault's anti-Cartesian yet mechanistic view, aesthetic pleasure was mediated by the mind. The ability to appreciate the beauty of polyphonic music was evidence of good sense and taste. When Duverney was appointed to the royal gardens in 1682 he continued to champion the new science and practised a fashionable moralizing anatomy for the benefit of the royal gloire. Yet after Colbert's death in 1683, new patronage brought a number of changes to the Académie. Publication policies were revised, pressure increased to finish the revised Histoire des animaux and the surgeon Jean Méry was appointed as anatomist. Although he and Duverney initially collaborated, they fell out over work on foetal circulation and Duverney withdrew from the Académie at the end of the 1690s.

When he left, Duverney took the texts, drawings and prints for the unfinished Histoire des animaux with him. In the short epilogue Guerrini emphasizes the importance of the anatomical projects...