Anatomical Archives Available

The archive of the Anatomical Society has recently been catalogued and is now available to researchers at the Wellcome Library. The collection covers the founding of the society until the 1980s, and includes a range of documents on membership, (SA/ANA/C) financial information (SA/ANA/B ) and a considerable amount of correspondence ( SA/ANA/D).

The Anatomical Society of Great Britain and Ireland was founded in May 1887 by Charles Barrett Lockwood, after collaborating with George M Humphry and Alexander Macalister. Lockwood was a surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and taught at the Medical College there, while Humphry and Macalister were renowned Professors and surgeons from the Medical College at Cambridge. The original minutes from the founding meeting in 1887 up until 1982 can be found in SA/ANA/A. By 1890 the society had its first overseas member and in 1894 two women were admitted from the London of Medicine for Women.

There have been over sixty presidents of the society, each one serving for just over two years and several have contributed to the advancement of biological and medical sciences. One such president is Professor Johnson Symington who was chair of anatomy at Queens College Belfast, and then appointed registrar of the college in 1901. He published several anatomy atlases, was president during 1903-1906, and the society reprinted an edition of his atlas in the 1950s. There are several awards in his name: The Symington Memorial Prize that was established in 1920 and is given out every 3 years by the society (see SA/ANA/D/11).

Another president was Professor George Mitchell, who was involved in the first use of penicillin amongst soldiers, initially distributing and in the Italy campaign, and then helping to give the drug out on D-Day. After the war he was appointed chair of anatomy at the University of Manchester. He was president of the society in 1961-1963 and some of his correspondence from this time is in this collection (see SA/ANA/D/3/3).

The society is also associated with the Journal of Anatomy (originally the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology) which was founded in 1865 by Humphry and Macalister. The Journal was independently edited for several years but upon the founding of the society in 1887, this ceased and it became fully owned by the society in 1916, when physiology was dropped from its title. (see SA/ANA/D/9) The society also has another journal: Aging Cell, which was launched in 2002.

The society’s aims are to promote, develop and advance research and education of the anatomical sciences. It achieves this through general, annual and scientific meetings, national and international conferences, awards and bursaries, exhibitions and publishing its own journals. In July 2010 the society shortened its name to the Anatomical Society.

For more information, please see the Anatomical Society website

Author: Morwenna Roche

Image: Mascagni, Paolo. Anatomia universa XLIV, tabulis aeneis juxta archetypum hominis adulti accuratissime repraesentata... Pisa: Firmin Didot for Nicolò Capurro, 1823[-1831] (Wellcome Library, F.267a)

Guest Post: Little Ilford School ‘Science Club’

We recently had the pleasure of sharing our Special Collections with Year 9 students from Little Ilford School in Newham as part of a science club run by Wellcome Collection’s Youth Programme.  Over the next few weeks we will be posting the students’ reflections on themes they explored at the library, so keep an eye out. Starting us off are Ben, Bilal, Lauren, Nicolas and Nicole:

‘Today my friends we are here to write about anatomy.  On 18^th April 2012 we got to see archives hundreds of years old, which fascinated us, and learnt how anatomy developed as the years passed.

Human anatomy is looking at what makes up the human body: its structure, functions, layout and systems which keep us humans alive.  ‘Anatomy’ comes from the Greek word ‘anatemnein’ which means “cut up” and that was how anatomy was once discovered: cutting up corpses to see what was inside them.

We firstly studied two images of a human body drawn in the mid 15th century.  Human dissection was illegal then and so many people dissected animals. One of the most common animals that was dissected was the pig and so they believed that the insides of a human were identical to that of a pig.

Later we looked at a printed newspaper document of a trial that took place in the 1800s. The newspaper article talked about the conviction and execution of three men over the murder of a young Italian boy for the use of medical science.  This shows us how greedy people were becoming to learn and to know more about the body.

Initially, our first thoughts were that of shock because of what we know today, already having all this information at our hands. 

But as we went on to discover and learn more, we began to think about it. What they did was to find out more about what they were, and how the body worked.  Without what they started we wouldn’t know as much about the body as we do today. So although we find it disgusting we have to be somewhat thankful.

After a while, a member of Wellcome Collection staff said “Thank god I’m alive now - you’ll know what I mean?”.  Well, first, we didn’t know what she meant but when she showed us the development of surgical apparatus… we understood.

Thank you for time, curious reader, as we must bid you farewell.  We think that Wellcome Collection is an astonishing place full of things on the history of medicine which will amuse and amaze you!

What do you think?’

Posted on behalf of Ben, Bilal, Lauren, Nicolas and Nicole

Images: (1) 'Muscle man' from ‘Anatomy. Anatomy of the Pig’ by Pseudo-Galen, mid 15th century (MS.290)

(2) Handbill describing trial of John Bishop, Thomas Williams and James May for the murder of an Italian boy, 1831 (MS.7058)

Object of the Month, August 2011 : Jan Wandelaar, Human Skeleton and young Rhinoceros

Of the many joys that accompany a stroll around the Wellcome Library’s stores, an unexpected encounter with a rhinoceros must rank as one of the more novel. The beast in question is Clara, an Indian Rhino who became in international superstar after arriving at the port of Rotterdam in 1741, at the tender age of two years old. Clara had been raised in the Bengal home of the director of the East India Company, who adopted her after her mother was killed by hunters. Evidently Clara was quite fond of human company as in Bengal she was allowed to meet visitors and even eat from the meal table ‘like a lap dog’. But on arrival in Rotterdam, to say that Clara was a novelty was an understatement. Her new owner, the ship's captain Douwe Mout van der Meer put Clara on public exhibition almost immediately and found the enterprise so profitable that he was soon able to give up his job and travel Europe with her full-time.



Over the course of the next seventeen years Clara was seen by many thousands of paying tourists, across the low countries, France, Germany, Austria, Italy and England. Rhinoceros fever hit Europe; medals were cast in her honour, poems addressed to her and during an especially triumphant stay in Paris in 1750 a hairstyle á la rhinoceros was named after her. Even Casanova wasn’t immune to Clara’s charms - although in his memoirs he reports that his mistress mistook the burly chap taking her entrance fee for the exhibit itself.

But Clara’s really lasting significance lay in zoological illustration. Until her arrival, artists and illustrators looking for an image of a rhinoceros were still slavishly copying Dürer’s famous woodcut of 1515, the manifest inaccuracy of which hadn’t detracted from the grip it held on the popular imagination. For artists and illustrators, therefore, Clara’s arrival was an opportunity not to be missed. One of the first to depict Clara was the artist and engraver Jan Wandelaar (1690-1759) who was at that time completing a commission to illustrate Bernard Siegfried Albinus’s magnificent Tabulae Sceleti et musculorum corporis humani, an anatomical atlas that promised to be the most accurate ever made. To enhance his figures, Wandelaar chose grandiose and whimsical naturalistic backgrounds which deepened the perspective and gave his figures a greater sense of volume. For his two plates illustrating the bones and the fourth order of muscles, he included Clara grazing in the background, her bulk and armour giving a pronounced contrast to the human form in front. The novelty of Clara’s appearance can’t have harmed Albinus’ enterprise either, as the London edition of the prints makes clear: “we thought the rarity of the beast would render these figures...more agreeable than any other ornament resulting in mere fancy.” Whatever the reason for her inclusion, these two prints are certainly amongst the earliest illustrations by a western artist to represent a rhinoceros with any degree of accuracy.



It wasn’t long before Clara was the darling of the art scene, having her portrait painted by some of the finest animal painters of the age. In 1748 the engraver Johann Elias Ridinger, (1658-1767), already famous for his sets of animal prints, made a series of six drawings of Clara in various poses, which he engraved as prints and used in the background of his other works. Clara appears to have aged considerably in the six years between the two engravings and makes quite a pathetic figure (although, interestingly, in the preliminary sketches she appears relaxed and rather less ‘droopy’). Early the next year the artist Jean-Baptiste Oudry (1686-1755) painted a life-size portrait of Clara at the fair of St Germain on a canvas 15 feet long and ten feet high, which was exhibited at the Paris Salon. And in 1751, while in Venice, Clara was the subject of two famous paintings by Pietro Longhi (1701?-1785), one of which is held in the National Gallery.



Clara died in London on 14th April 1758. In spite of her peripatetic existence, Clara’s life in Europe had been longer and considerably less brutal than her few forebears - Dürer’s rhinoceros, bound in a velvet collar and gilt chains, drowned in a shipwreck off the coast of Italy. Her successor, the so-called ‘Madrid’ rhinoceros of 1579, fared little better - after she overturned a chariot full of nobles the King of Spain ordered the removal of her eyes and her horn. Clara had led quite an extraordinary travelling life and enjoyed a diet that included “a good quantity of wine and spirituous liquors” as well as beer, oranges, and tobacco smoke blown up her nose. What’s more, it was her image which finally supplanted Dürer’s rhinoceros in the popular imagination and ensured that her likeness can be found in numerous natural histories from the eighteenth century to today.



The rhino is a homely beast,

For human eyes he's not a feast.

Farwell, farewell, you old rhinoceros,

I'll stare at something less prepoceros.

(Ogden Nash, The Rhinoceros)



Images : 1. An écorché figure, front view, with left arm extended, showing the bones and the fourth order of muscles, with a grazing rhinoceros in the background. Line engraving by J. Wandelaar, 1742 (Wellcome Library no. 565796i)

2. An écorché figure, back view, with left arm extended, showing the bones and the fourth order of muscles, with a rhinoceros seen in the background. Line engraving by J. Wandelaar, 1742 (Wellcome Library no. 565802i)

3. A rhinoceros. Woodcut after C. Gessner, 1551. (Wellcome Library no. 41009i)

4. A rhinoceros, also known as Miss Clara, shown with a lake and palm trees in the background. Etching by J. E. Ridinger, ca.1748 (Wellcome Library no. 39300i)



Author: Jo Maddocks

A trip to Hollingsville

Currently being broadcast on Resonance FM is Hollingsville, a series in which each week writer Ken Hollings and guests explore “different aspects of our historical relationship with technology, from architecture to bodies and from computers to phantoms”.

Last week, the episode ‘Wounds: Blood on the Street’ featured as guests the crime novelist Cathi Unsworth and the Wellcome Library’s Research Officer, Ross MacFarlane.

The episode was broadcast live but is now available as a podcast from the Resonance FM website. It includes the guests discussing such topics as Wound Men illustrations, changes to the understanding of anatomy through time, the roles of ‘resurrection men’ in the history of London and what makes for a ‘murder city’…

Details on the other 'Hollingsville' episodes are available from Ken Hollings's blog and the Resonance FM website.

Image: Illustration of a Wound Man, showing a figure man afflicted with numerous injuries, including a snake bite, a dog bite, a club to the head and various knife wounds, cuts and bruises, c.1675 (MS.990)

What's new in Paris--July 1539

In an article in the March 2010 issue of Print quarterly, Kate Heard publishes a rare early reference to a French anatomical fugitive sheet. [1] Even more unexpected: it comes from an Englishman. More about that later. But first, what on earth is an anatomical fugitive sheet?

Woodcut, 15--. Wellcome Library

It is a quaint term used by bibliographers since the 1920s to refer to prints (woodcuts or engravings) that circulated as single sheets from the 1530s to the mid-17th century, and which showed anatomical figures: the organs are cut to outline and pasted on the sheet in layers so that they can be lifted up one layer at a time. [2] It was a publisher's practice that was revived at various times in the 19th century: examples of books containing such sheets are E.W. Tuson's A supplement to myology, (London 1828), Gustave Joseph Witkowski's Anatomie iconoclastique (Paris 1874-1876) and Etienne Rabaud's Anatomie élémentaire du corps humain (Paris 1900). In the 20th century the same principle was used in Dr Jonathan Miller's best-selling pop-up book The human body (London 1983), as well as in books for medical and nursing students.


Lithograph of the thigh by Samuel G. Tovey and E.W. Tuson, 1828. Wellcome Library no. 561005i

Kate Heard's new discovery is a document in the British National Archives. It is a letter from Edmund Bonner, the British ambassador at the court of Francis I in Paris, to Arthur Plantagenet, Viscount Lisle (b. before 1472, d. 1542), the deputy of Calais. Bonner was a canon of St Paul's and a future bishop of London. Lisle was the illegitimate son of Edward IV (1442–1483) and therefore the uncle of Henry VIII. In Calais he was responsible for defending and governing the city, and for running spy-rings in north-east France and the Netherlands. His wife Honor accompanied him in Calais. [3]

Bonner wrote to Lisle in late July 1539 sending gifts to both Lisle and his wife. For Lady Lisle Bonner sent a turquoise (jewel), and for Lord Lisle "nothing of noveltie save this present which of late was here emprinting", i.e. a printed novelty of some kind. The subject is further described as follows, in Heard's transcription:

the anatomie of the man is iuged here to be doon exquisytlie, the anatomie of the woman pleaseth me not soo moche how be it mr bekynsall that is married & hath had but oon childe telleth me, that that is the figure of women in their travayl, to whos iugement, because I am ignorant, I leve the matter, thinking that he toke consultacion with some mydwife touchyng his sentence.

(i.e. The anatomy of the man is judged here [in Paris] to be done exquisitely, the anatomy of the woman pleases me not so much. Howbeit, Mr Beckinsall who is married and has had but one child tells me that that is the figure of women in labour; to his judgment, because I am ignorant, I leave the matter, thinking that he consulted some midwife about his opinion.)

What was this print? Given the date, mid-1539, it must surely have been one of the first anatomical fugitive sheets, a pair of woodcuts of a man and a woman which were published in Paris in the very same year of 1539 by Jean Ruelle (Carlino no. 6).

Above left, the man, and above right, the woman, in a pair of anatomical fugitive sheets, Paris 1539. Centre, detail from the woman's print showing the imprint.
Wellcome Library.

The imprint on each print states that it was for sale at the sign of the Fox's Brush in the Rue Saint-Jacques in Paris. Since only two anatomical fugitive sheets from before 1539 are recorded (one from Strasbourg and one from Augsburg), Bonner was well advised to describe his gift as a "noveltie". The full belly of the woman in Ruelle's print could be interpreted as a sign of pregnancy.

A possible alternative mentioned by Heard is a single sheet of a man and a woman which exists with French text pasted on it. It is reproduced above, at the top of this posting. However, no French edition of this print is known from as early as 1539. The paddle held by the woman contains text in Latin and English, and the version which has the French wording refers to "Maistre Andre Vesali" which implies a later date: Andreas Vesalius published his anatomical treatise De humani corporis fabrica in 1543. He had published Tabulae anatomicae sex in 1538, but those tables showed skeletons and viscera, unlike the Ruelle plates.

There has been much discussion of the purpose and audience of anatomical fugitive sheets, which is frustrated by the lack of independent contemporary comment on them. Here in Bonner's letter is a testament to their novelty, their esteem among Parisian connoisseurs, and their suitability as a gift from an ambassador in Paris, not to a medical student or a natural philosopher but to a noble courtier who would appreciate a novel work of art. There is also of course the interesting remark that Mr Beckinsall (John Beckinsall, another English functionary in France known to both Bonner and Lisle) must have consulted a midwife before giving his opinion that the woman would be pregnant. Bonner must be joking here, perhaps provoking his friend to lift the flaps and see whether a foetus is depicted in the womb (it is, as can be seen in the sequence of still images reproduced in the Wellcome Library catalogue).

For other implications of the letter, the reader is referred to the article in Print quarterly.

[1] Kate Heard, 'The gift of a print in 1539', Print quarterly, 2010, 27: 53-54

[2] Andrea Carlino, Paper bodies: a catalogue of anatomical fugitive sheets 1538-1687, London: Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine, 1999 (Medical History, supplement no. 19)

[3] Oxford dictionary of national biography, Oxford University Press, 2004, articles on "Plantagenet, Arthur, Viscount Lisle" and "Bonner, Edmund"

Rackstrow's Museum

Exquisite Bodies, the Wellcome Collection exhibition which closes this Sunday, aims to provide a history of the anatomical model in the nineteenth century. The show begins however, with an introduction to anatomical museums in the eighteenth century.

One of the first items on display is the Wellcome Library’s copy of A descriptive catalogue ... of Rackstrow's Museum: consisting of a large, and very valuable collection, of most curious anatomical figures, and real preparations ... with a great variety of natural and artificial curiosities. To be seen at no. 197 Fleet-Street ... London.

Rackstrow’s was one of the most (in)famous museums of its kind in late eighteenth century London. Surviving catalogues give us not only an overview of its proclaimed contents, but also an insight into contemporary tastes. (Its most famous exhibit in its early years was a wax model figure of a heavily pregnant woman, with red liquors passing through its glass veins to illustrate the circulation of the blood).

Noted in by his contemporaries as a modeller, Benjamin Rackstrow's Museum – not in its day regarded as a salubrious environment - lived on after his death in 1772. From existing catalogues, we know that in the 1780s, Rackstrow’s Museum was arranged into three sections: the Anatomical Collection, the Collection of Natural and Artificial Rarities and the Collection of Figures resembling Life.

The Anatomical Collection contained the majority of objects in the Museum (74 out of the 117 items listed in the 1784 catalogue), and was a mix of waxwork models and specimens preserved in spirit. Here then, were to be found “diseased wombs”; “children still-born, preserved in spirit”; “miscarriages or abortions”; “monstrous births, from women” (but also “from beasts”, such as cows, ducks, cats and dogs).

A sense of the museum’s scale is given by the “astonishing skeleton of a Spermi-Ceti Whale, measuring seventy-two feet in length”, and of its enterprising nature by the fact that not only was an “An ancient Mummy, in its original coffin” exhibited, but a “fine print” of the Mummy was also available for purchase.

The “Natural and Artificial Rarities”, consisted of preserved animals “Dried and in Spirits”. Here, the paying customer would come face to face with (amongst others) an armadillo, a porcupine, a shark and two crocodiles. The “Collection of Figures resembling Life”, lends a regal air to the medico-menagerie; with a bust of George III sharing space with “a grand figure of George II” but also harks back to the extremes of life from the start of the Museum, with moulds taken from life of the recently deceased Mr Bamford (“the Staffordshire Giant”) and Mr Coan (“the Norfolk Dwarf”).

The Museum lasted until the 19th Century, during which time this part of Fleet Street became associated in fiction with a different form of anatomical study. Rackstrow’s address of 197 Fleet Street no longer registers on the mental landscape, but the fictional resident of 186 Fleet Street certainly does.

(Catalogues for Rackstrow’s Museum are available through Eighteenth Century Collections Online, one of the online resources available free of charge to Wellcome Library readers).

Ayurvedic man. Wellcome Library Item of the month, October 2009

It was on 15 September 1986 that the Wellcome Institute received a letter from the London art dealer David Salmon, who ran a shop called David Tremayne Ltd towards the western end of the King's Road in Chelsea. He had something which he thought would be of interest. Tremayne was not one of the Wellcome Institute Library's regular suppliers, but an appointment was made for 3.30 pm on Monday 13 October, and one of the Wellcome Institute's curators duly attended the shop at that time, on this day in 1986. The shop was filled with sculptures and textiles from Nepal, from which Mr Salmon had recently returned, and he was evidently a specialist in Nepali art. And it was a painting from Nepal that he wished to show the Library.

"Ayurvedic man". Wellcome Library no. 574912i

It was certainly an extraordinary sight. About equivalent to A2 in size (60 x 42 cm.), the figure was not exactly as shown in the traditional "Alexandrian series", nor did it obviously fall into any style of Hindu art that would be readily recognizable to a non-expert. The nearest resemblance was to Nepali diagrams of chakras, showing the passage of Kundalini forces through them and around the body; but those do not show discrete organs. [1] Nor was it, or anything like it, shown in standard reference books such as Herrlinger and Putscher's two-volume history of medical illustration. The price was substantial (£1,750), and would wipe out most of the remaining funds in the acquisitions budget, but given the painting's rarity and good condition, would not be out of line with the market. The Wellcome Library did therefore agree to buy it, and when the funds had been transferred, the painting made its final journey from the King's Road to the Wellcome Library in the Euston Road on 26 October 1986.

There over the years it was frequently reproduced, exhibited and commented on, but the uniqueness which had made it desirable in the first place also made it difficult to understand. Now however two articles have appeared in quick succession which shed light on its content and context.

In his article in Asian medicine, Dr Dominik Wujastyk identifies the lettering surrounding the work as verses from a classic Ayurvedic work called Bhāvaprakāśa by Bhāvamiśra (fl. ca. 1650–1690). [2] Bhāvamiśra is thought to have been born near Madras (Chennai) and to have worked in Benares (Varanasi). The extracts are taken from chapter 3 of his work, that deals with anatomy and embryology. The verses on and around the painting do not function as tightly-integrated labels to the body image, but rather as reflections on related anatomical issues. Most of the texts (in Sanskrit and other Indic tongues) are garbled, suggesting that they might have been copied from an earlier version of the painting now untraced, by someone who did not understand what was being transcribed. Dr Wujastyk provides an image, a transliteration and a translation of each of the blocks of text.

The parts depicted and described by Bhāvamiśra by do not necessarily correspond one-to-one with organs of the body familiar to those brought up with Traditional Western Medicine or its present day derivatives. For instance the sequence of parts involved in digestion and excretion includes numerous "receptacles" (of wind, of impurities, of urine, of phlegm, of raw matter, of digested food etc.) that are not necessarily identifiable with specific service stations along the highway of the western alimentary canal. Likewise there are separate names for two separate parts between the ankle and the heel, which have no western names. The two lungs, regarded in the west as identical organs in reverse, have two different and unrelated names in Sanskrit, and both organs are given different functions from respiration.

The descriptions explain the functions of the parts in vivid terms. The humour Bile is described as "Cook, dyer, reacher, illuminator and shiner", each function depending on its location in the body, while the humour Phlegm is described as "Moistener, dripper, taster, oiler and gluer", again according to location.

For further analysis please see the article, which includes an extensive bibliography. A hard copy of the journal is available in the Wellcome Library , and an electronic version is available free from the e-repository of University College London.

The same painting has re-appeared in an article in a new journal from Buenos Aires: Eä - Revista de humanidades médicas & estudios sociales de la ciencia y la tecnología [3]. The electronic article is available free on the publisher's website, supported by SAHIME, the Argentinean Association for the History of Medicine. The author emphasizes the difference between the understanding of functions according to Ayurvedic teaching and according to the western anatomy introduced into India by Imperial colonisers. The Wellcome painting expresses the Ayurvedic doctrine rather than colonial anatomy derived from French eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century pathology. The article contains some interesting quotations from both sides.

[1] Ajit Mookerjee, Kundalini: the arousal of the inner energy, London: Thames and Hudson, 1982, pp. 50-51, 81-82 (thanks to T. Richard Blurton for this reference).

[2] Dominik Wujastyk, 'A body of knowledge: the Wellcome Ayurvedic anatomical man and his Sanskrit context', Asian Medicine: tradition and modernity 4 (2008): 201-248

[3] Jayanta Bhattacharya, 'The knowledge of anatomy and health in Āyurveda and modern medicine: colonial confrontation and its outcome', Eä - Revista de humanidades médicas & estudios sociales de la ciencia y la tecnología, 2009, 1:1-51 (Wellcome Library painting reproduced p. 25)

The Body in History summer school

A group of young women from a number of local schools recently attended 'The Body in History' summer school, run by the Wellcome Library and UCL Museums and Collections.

During the week , students experienced a range of activites exploring the human body from scientific, historical, ethical and artistic viewpoints. These included:

• an osteoarchaeology session with staff and specimens from the Museum of London


• a demonstration of Renaissance surgery - complete with leeches and 'wound' make-up


• a visit to the Medicine Man gallery in Wellcome Collection


• a crash course in the history of anatomy, drawing on the resources of the Wellcome Library, followed by an animation workshop at the South Camden City Learning Centre


• comparative anatomy and the secrets of digestion at the Grant Museum


• an exploration of ethical issues surrounding transplants, DNA and truth in medicine


• talks about reading faces, and about perception and the brain


• a visit to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons - including a surgical skills workshop


• an anatomical art session

The animation below is one of four created in one day by the students. This group were particularly interested in Van Leeuwenhoek's discovery of sperm and his theory about miniature babies being ready-formed within each, ready to be transplanted into the mother.

16th century anatomical sheets - images and animations now online

The Library’s rare and important collection of printed anatomical sheets dating from the 16th century are now freely available online via Wellcome Images. These intriguing prints depict the human body through labelled illustrations, often using a three-dimensional 'pop-up' device of superimposed flaps, which can be raised in sequence to display the internal anatomy of the male or female figure. The fugitive sheet thus mimics the act of dissection.

They were a popular instructional aid in the 16th century and many were produced in vernacular languages which could be read by a lay audience interested in the workings of the human body. The earliest recorded sheets were printed in Strasbourg by Heinrich Vogtherr in 1538. They were probably produced in great numbers but only a very few survive today. There are 19 sheets in our collection, many in pairs of male and female figures and one set of three with a skeleton sheet. This is the largest single collection in any institution. The surviving examples represent only a fraction of a much larger number most of which are now lost for ever, but there is always the hope of fresh discoveries in unexpected places.

Images have been created showing each flap in sequence. Animated versions are also available from the catalogue records, showing the flaps raised and lowered in sequence.

Image is Interiorum corporis humani partium viva delineatio, Paris, 1539.

Baffling Bodies

If you have difficulty telling your clavicle from your patella, and have never considered who discovered Fallopian tubes this is the course for you. A weekend of workshops and activities will take you through the history of how we have understood and learnt about our bodies, looking at the human form through the eyes of artists, scientists and history buffs. Designed for beginners, you’ll need curiosity and enthusiasm but no previous knowledge. The event will be held on September 5-6 between 10am and 4pm.

Activities will include:

Dem Bones – exploring human remains with osteoarchaeologists from the Museum of London

Renaissance surgery demonstration – Roll up ! Roll up ! Get your gangrene seen to here ! Volunteers for amputation will be required.

Pickled bits and stitches – a visit to the Hunterian Museum at the Royal College of Surgeons, plus a surgical skills workshop.

A beginner’s guide to the history of anatomy - an informal talk with the chance to explore original material from the Wellcome Library’s collections.

Exquisite Bodies – a tour of the Wellcome Collection temporary exhibition looking at 19th century anatomical models.

Creative workshop – inspired by the Exquisite Bodies exhibition, you will create your own model with the help of a professional artist.
Cost: £30 per person. Refreshments and lunch will be included on both days.

Booking will open later in July. If you would like to be notified when booking opens, or have any queries, please email us.

Author: Eleanor Lanyon