1 Hunter, William, Two Introductory Lectures, Delivered by Dr. William Hunter to His Last Course of Anatomical Lectures, at His Theatre in Great Windmill Street, London: J. Johnson, 1784, p. 57Google Scholar.

2 Bell, Charles, Letters of Sir Charles Bell, Selected from His Correspondence with His Brother George Joseph Bell, London: J. Murray, 1870, p. 220Google Scholar (July 1814).

3 Berkowitz, Carin, ‘The beauty of anatomy: visual displays and surgical education in early nineteenth-century London’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine (2011) 85, pp. 248–271Google Scholar.

4 For examples of others, see Kemp, Martin and Wallace, Marina, Spectacular Bodies: The Art and Science of the Human Body from Leonardo to Now, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000Google Scholar; Massey, Lyle, ‘Pregnancy and pathology: picturing childbirth in eighteenth-century obstetric atlases’, Art Bulletin (2005) 87, pp. 73–91CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Ludmilla Jordanova, ‘Gender, generation and science: William Hunter's obstetrical atlas’, in William Bynum and Roy Porter (eds.), William Hunter and the eighteenth-century Medical World, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985; Martin Kemp, ‘ “The mark of truth”: looking and learning in some anatomical illustrations from the Renaissance and the eighteenth century’, in William Bynum and Roy Porter (eds.), Medicine and the Five Senses, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993; Cazort, Mimi, Kornell, Monique and Roberts, K.B., The Ingenious Machine of Nature: Four Centuries of Art and Anatomy, Ottawa: National Gallery of Canada, 1996Google Scholar; Sappol, Michael, Dream Anatomy, Washington, DC: US Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health, National Library of Medicine, 2006Google Scholar.

5 Shapin, Steven, ‘History of science and its sociological reconstructions’, History of Science (1982) 20, pp. 157–211, 197CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Shapin draws on one of the main tenets of the sociology of scientific knowledge here. Barnes, Barry and Shapin, Steven, Natural Order: Historical Studies of Scientific Culture, Beverly Hills: Sage Publications, 1979Google Scholar; Barnes, Barry and Edge, David, Science in Context: Readings in the Sociology of Science, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1982Google Scholar.

6 On Pestalozzi and the role of visual display in teaching science see, for example, Secord, Anne, ‘Botany on a plate: pleasure and the power of pictures in promoting early nineteenth-century scientific knowledge’, Isis (2002) 93, pp. 28–57Google Scholar; Simon Schaffer, ‘Object lessons’, in Svante Lindqvist (ed.), Nobel Symposium 112, Canton, MA: Science History Publications, 2000.

7 Roy Porter has said of this supposedly backward period, ‘Thus eighteenth-century English medical attention was not the wasteland sometimes supposed, but to appreciate this we must look not to the universities but rather to the intellectual arena of London, “the best spot in Great Britain, and probably in the whole world”, thought Beddoes, “where medicine may be taught as well as cultivated to most advantage”. If we still see it as a wilderness, it is because we have swallowed wholesale the propaganda of nineteenth-century reformers, and because we are looking into the past for the shape of things to come’. Porter, Roy, ‘Medical lecturing in Georgian London’, BJHS (1995) 28, pp. 91–99CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed, 99. See also Cunningham, Andrew, The Anatomist Anatomis'd: An Experimental Discipline in Enlightenment Europe, Farnham: Ashgate, 2010, pp. 83–147Google Scholar.

8 Pedagogy is acknowledged as central to the pursuit of science in a variety of recent texts. See Kaiser, David, Drawing Theories Apart: The Dispersion of Feynman Diagrams in Postwar Physics, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005Google Scholar; Kaiser, , Pedagogy and the Practice of Science: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005Google Scholar; Carin Berkowitz, ‘Medical science as pedagogy in early nineteenth-century Britain: Charles Bell and the politics of London medical reform’, PhD thesis, Cornell University, 2010.

9 Daston, Lorraine and Galison, Peter, Objectivity, New York: Zone Books, 2007, p. 22Google Scholar.

10 Hunter, William, Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata, Birmingham: John Baskerville, 1774Google Scholar. Discussion of the expense of printing can be found in Massey, op. cit. (4), pp. 78–79.

11 Massey, op. cit. (4), pp. 78–79.

12 For work on anatomical models and specimens and anatomy museums, much of which sees anatomy museums as having a pedagogical as well as a political function (in particular Chaplin and Reinarz), but which also tends to read the objects themselves in isolation, removed from other kinds of display, and sometimes as privileged, see Samuel Alberti, ‘The museum affect: visiting collections of anatomy and natural history in Victorian Britain’, in Aileen Fyfe and Bernard Lightman (eds.), Science in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-Century Sites and Experiences, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007; Bates, A.W., ‘ “Indecent and demoralising representations”: public anatomy museums in mid-Victorian England’, Medical History (2008) 52, pp. 1–22CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed; Chaplin, Simon, ‘Nature dissected, or dissection naturalized? The case of John Hunter's museum’, Museum & Society (2008) 6, pp. 135–151Google Scholar; Helen McCormack, ‘Housing the collection: the Great Windmill Street anatomy theatre and museum’, in Peter Black (ed.), ‘My Highest Pleasures’: William Hunter's Art Collection, Glasgow: University of Glasgow Press, 2007; Reinarz, Jonathan, ‘The age of museum medicine: the rise and fall of the medical museum of Birmingham's School of Medicine’, Social History of Medicine (2005) 18, pp. 419–446Google Scholar; Hopwood, Nick and de Chadarevian, Soraya (eds.), Models: The Third Dimension of Science, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005Google Scholar; Panzanelli, Roberta and Schlosser, Julius, Ephemeral Bodies: Wax Sculpture and the Human Figure, Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 2008Google Scholar; Maerker, Anna, Model Experts: Wax Anatomies and Enlightenment in Florence and Vienna, 1775–1815, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2011Google Scholar; Messbarger, Rebecca Marie, The Lady Anatomist: The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13 References to ‘visual culture’ (usually meaning two-dimensional images in texts) have become increasingly common to the extent that titles containing the phrase are frequent. Cartwright, Lisa, Screening the Body: Tracing Medicine's Visual Culture, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995Google Scholar; Evans, Jessica and Hall, Stuart, Visual Culture: The Reader, Thousand Oaks: SAGE Publications in association with the Open University, 1999Google Scholar; Mirzoeff, Nicholas, The Visual Culture Reader, London: Routledge, 1998Google Scholar; Pauwels, L., Visual Cultures of Science: Rethinking Representational Practices in Knowledge Building and Science Communication, Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, University Press of New England, 2006Google Scholar; Schwartz, Vanessa R. and Przyblyski, Jeannene M., The Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture Reader, New York: Routledge, 2004Google Scholar; Sturken, Marita and Cartwright, Lisa, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001Google Scholar.

14 Porter, Roy, ‘William Hunter, surgeon’, History Today (1983) 33(9), pp. 50–52Google Scholar.

15 Thomson, Stewart Craig, ‘The surgeon–anatomists of Great Windmill Street School’, Bulletin of the Society of Medical History of Chicago (1937–46) 5, pp. 301–321, 314Google Scholar.

16 Kaufman, Matthew, ‘John Bell (1763–1820), the “father” of surgical anatomy’, Journal of Medical Biography (2005) 13(2), pp. 73–81Google Scholar; Walls, E.W., ‘John Bell, 1763–1820’, Medical History (1964) 8, pp. 63–69Google Scholar.

17 For more on Bell's teaching, his priority dispute and his work with artists see Berkowitz, op. cit. (8); Gordon-Taylor, Gordon and Walls, E.W., Sir Charles Bell, His Life and Times, Edinburgh: E. & S. Livingstone, 1958Google Scholar; Cranefield, Paul F. and Bell, Charles, The Way In and the Way Out: François Magendie, Charles Bell, and the Roots of the Spinal Nerves: With a Facsimile of Charles Bell's Annotated Copy of His Ideas of a New Anatomy of the Brain, Mount Kisco: Futura Publishing Company, 1974Google Scholar.

18 Baillie, Matthew, A Series of Engravings, Accompanied with Explanations, Which Are Intended to Illustrate the Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body, London: printed by W. Bulmer and Co. for J. Johnson; and G. and W. Nicol, 1799Google Scholar, p. 5.

19 Hunter, op. cit. (10), Preface.

20 Charles Bell, Engravings of the Arteries, Illustrating the Second Volume of the Anatomy of the Human Body, Bell, John, Anatomy of the Human Body, London: Longman and Rees, 1801, pp. 15–16Google Scholar.

21 Hunter, op. cit. (1), p. 6.

22 Richardson, Ruth, Death, Dissection, and the Destitute, 2nd edn, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001, pp. 3–30Google Scholar. The first chapter deals with popular culture and corpses, describing a host of popular rituals surrounding death and corpses (like eating with a dead loved one, taking sacrament with the corpse, corpse watching, etc.). Richardson is concerned with popular and particularly religious meanings and beliefs surrounding corpses, which were everyday objects. See also Åhrén, Eva, Death, Modernity, and the Body: Sweden 1870–1940, Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009Google Scholar. For an exploration of the popularity of dissection and anatomy in the American context well into the nineteenth century see Sappol, Michael, A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002Google Scholar.

23 Bell, John, Engravings of the Bones, Muscles, and Joints, London: Longman and Rees, and Cadell and Davies, 1804, p. xiGoogle Scholar.

24 Hunter, op. cit. (1), p. 112.

25 Bell, Charles, A System of Operative Surgery: Founded on the Basis of Anatomy, 2 vols., London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, and Orme, 1807, vol. 1, p. ii (italics in the original)Google Scholar.

26 Hunter, op. cit. (1), 109 (italics in original).

27 Bell, op. cit. (2), 409.

28 For example, Bell, op. cit. (2), p. 199 (April 1812).

29 Bell, Charles, ‘Diseases and accidents to which the hip-joint is liable’, London Medical Gazette (1828) 1(6), pp. 137–142, 137Google Scholar.

30 Hunter, op. cit. (1), p. 112 (italics in the original).

31 Hunter, op. cit. (1), p. 55.

32 For more on the curious and curiously public nature of anatomy museums see Alberti, op. cit. (12); Appleby, John, ‘Human curiosities and the Royal Society, 1699–1751’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London (1996) 50, pp. 13–27Google Scholar; Bates, op. cit. (12).

33 Hunter, op. cit. (1), p. 55 (emphasis added).

34 Hunter, op. cit. (1), p. 89 (italics in the original).

35 According to Simon Chaplin, John Hunter had over seven thousand specimens. Chaplin, op. cit. (12), p. 135.

36 ‘Hunter had many advantages over his rivals. He was a splendid lecturer. He had new anatomical discoveries to impart to his students, and owned better specimens preserved in spirits in glass cases’. Porter, op. cit. (14), p. 52.

37 Chaplin, op. cit. (12), p. 137.

38 Hunter, op. cit. (1), p. 56.

39 Hunter, op. cit. (1), p. 57.

40 Bell, op. cit. (2), p. 73 (19 May 1806).

41 Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh, Bell Collection, GC 1.43.04.

42 Hunter, William, Marshall, Alice Julia and Teacher, John H., Catalogue of the Anatomical Preparations of William Hunter in the Museum of the Anatomy Department, Glasgow: University of Glasgow, 1970, pp. 661–667Google Scholar. Hunter's catalogue echoes the virtues ascribed to Bell's models, describing one cast thus: ‘A cast in Paris plaster, coloured after life’.

43 A present-day physiologist, Anne McNabb of Virginia Tech, who heard me talk about this system of displays, commented that when you open a human body, it quickly becomes a brown, stringy mess. To see its structure through dissection, ideally you would look at the cadaver right at the moment of death, when color was still present such that you could distinguish parts. But since British anatomists of the period had positioned themselves as antivivisectionists, preservations and models restored that ability to see order amidst a brown stringy mess by re-creating the colours of life, or fresh death, for British anatomists.

44 Hunter, op. cit. (1), 57.

45 Bell, op. cit. (25), p. 125.

46 Bell, op. cit. (2), p. 200 (1 June 1812).

47 Bell Collection, BC.xii.2.M.57, GC 11006.

48 For one example, see the posthumously edited and published Hunter, Marshall and Teacher, op. cit. (42).

49 Bell, op. cit. (23), p. xi.

50 Bell, op. cit. (23), p. 93.

51 Bell, op. cit. (23), p. xix.

52 Bell, op. cit. (2), p. 150 (10 June 1809).

53 Daston and Galison deploy such dichotomies widely in Objectivity. Their treatment depends on such oppositions as objectivity and subjectivity, representing and analysing, working objects and nature, truth and beauty, and representing and analysing.

54 Chaplin, op. cit. (12), p. 137.

55 Hunter, op. cit. (10), Preface.

56 Bell, op. cit. (25), pp. xviii–xix.

57 Bell, op. cit. (20), p. 6.

58 Daston and Galison argue, by contrast, that anatomists of the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries crafted their anatomical illustrations from ‘ideal types’. For more on this see Daston and Galison, op. cit. (9), pp. 69–83; Daston, and Galison, , ‘The image of objectivity’, Representations (1992) 40, pp. 81–128Google Scholar.

59 Bell, op. cit. (20), p. 15.

60 Bell, op. cit. (20), p. 80.

61 The debate is discussed extensively in both Kemp, Martin, ‘True to their natures: Sir Joshua Reynolds and Dr. William Hunter at the Royal Academy of Arts’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London (1992) 46, pp. 77–88Google Scholar; and Mount, Harry, ‘Van Rymsdyk and the nature-menders: an early victim of the two cultures divide’, British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies (2006) 26, pp. 79–96Google Scholar.

62 Daston and Galison invert Hunter's own passage in a way that causes significant distortion, writing, ‘He asserted that a “simple portrait” bore “the mark of truth, and becomes almost as infallible as the object itself”, but acknowledged that “being finished from a view of one subject, [it] will often be somewhat indistinct of defective in some parts”, whereas the figure “made up perhaps from a variety of studies after NATURE, may exhibit in one view, what could only be seen in several objects; and it admits of a better arrangement, of abridgement, and of greater precision”’. They reverse Hunter's two sentences (he was responding to Joshua Reynolds, acceding to Reynolds's point about averaging before asserting the superiority of representing the individual body in the original) and leave out the penultimate sentence of the paragraph: ‘the one shews the object, or gives perception; the other only describes or gives an idea of it’. Daston and Galison, op. cit. (9), pp. 75–77.

63 Hunter, op. cit. (10), Plate VI.

64 Bell, op. cit. (23), p. vi.

65 Daston and Galison, op. cit. (9), p. 77.

66 Bell, op. cit. (2), p. 176 (9 June 1810).

67 Hunter, op. cit. (10), p. 3.

68 Bell, op. cit. (23), p. xx.

69 Bell, op. cit. (2), p. 265 (5 August 1819).

70 Hunter, op. cit. (10), Preface.

71 Appel, Toby A., The Cuvier–Geoffroy Debate: French Biology in the Decades before Darwin, New York: Oxford University Press, 1987Google Scholar; Spary, E.C., Utopia's Garden: French Natural History from Old Regime to Revolution, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000Google Scholar.

72 Baillie, Matthew, The Morbid Anatomy of Some of the Most Important Parts of the Human Body, London: J. Johnson, 1793Google Scholar.

73 Baillie, op. cit. (18), p. 3.

74 Baillie, op. cit. (18), p. 6.

75 Baillie, op. cit. (18), p. 19.

76 Porter, Theodore M., Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995Google Scholar; Porter, , Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004Google Scholar; Hacking, Ian, The Taming of Chance, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

77 Bell, Charles, A System of Operative Surgery: Founded on the Basis of Anatomy, vol. 1, London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme and Brown and Cadell and Davies, 1814, p. iiGoogle Scholar (emphasis added).

78 Bell, op. cit. (2), p. 132 (17 November 1808).

79 Hunter, op. cit. (10), p. 3.