This chapter reassesses characterisations of the long eighteenth century as one devoted to accumulating anatomies and constructing taxonomies. Scholars have traced a broad movement, across the sciences, politics, and wider culture, toward simplification and categorisation – against the threat of ambiguity and complexity. In particular, critics and historians have identified a drive to identify anatomical, physiological explanations for human character and behaviour. Yet, those other eighteenth-century cultural ‘revolutions’ – the culture of sensibility and the emergence of modern selfhood – indicate a growing emphasis on specificity, individuation, and personal identity, which would seem to oppose the trend toward simplification. How do we account, then, for these seemingly contradictory movements towards simplification on the one hand and complexity on the other? I address this question by focusing on the cultural resonances surrounding certain objects, which ‘perform’ identity at the broad and busy intersection of politics, medicine, literature, and visual culture. In doing so, I show how things and words became fused with bodies in the development of anatomical and physiological knowledge throughout the long eighteenth century.