The wild success of the traveling Body Worlds exhibition is testimony to the powerful allure that human bodies can have when opened up for display in gallery spaces. But while anatomy museums have shown their visitors much about bodies, they themselves are something of an obscure phenomenon, with their incredible technological developments and complex uses of visual images and the flesh itself remaining largely under researched. This book investigates anatomy museums in Western settings, revealing how they have operated in the often passionate pursuit of knowledge that inspires both fascination and fear. Elizabeth Hallam explores these museums, past and present, showing how they display the human body—whether naked, stripped of skin, completely dissected, or rendered in the form of drawings, three-dimensional models, x-rays, or films. She identifies within anatomy museums a diverse array of related issues—from the representation of deceased bodies in art to the aesthetics of science, from body donation to techniques for preserving corpses and ritualized practices for disposing of the dead. Probing these matters through in-depth study, Anatomy Museum unearths a strange and compelling cultural history of the spaces human bodies are made to occupy when displayed after death.

Written by a museum professional and based on a course taught for many years, The Anatomy of a Museum is an engaging and accessible volume that provides a unique insider’s guide to what museums are and how they operate. An insider’s view of the rarefied world of the museum that provides a refreshing and unique account of the reality of the workings of museum life The material has been successfully tested in a course that the author has taught for 14 years Miller has extensive experience at all levels of museum work, from painting walls for exhibitions to museum directorship Clearly and engagingly written, the book covers all the component parts and various disciplines of museum operations, and opinions and perspectives are drawn from a deep knowledge of the field Includes useful pedagogical material, including questions, discussion topics, and a range of anecdotes

This illustrated volume examines the different methods artists and anatomists used to reveal the inner workings of the human body and evoke wonder in its form. For centuries, anatomy was a fundamental component of artistic training, as artists such as Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo sought to skillfully portray the human form. In Europe, illustrations that captured the complex structure of the body—spectacularly realized by anatomists, artists, and printmakers in early atlases such as Andreas Vesalius’s De humani corporis fabrica libri septem of 1543—found an audience with both medical practitioners and artists. Flesh and Bones examines the inventive ways anatomy has been presented from the sixteenth through the twenty-first century, including an animated corpse displaying its own body for study, anatomized antique sculpture, spectacular life-size prints, delicate paper flaps, and 3-D stereoscopic photographs. Drawn primarily from the vast holdings of the Getty Research Institute, the over 150 striking images, which range in media from woodcut to neon, reveal the uncanny beauty of the human body under the skin

Anatomy museums around the world showcase preserved corpses in service of education and medical advancement, but they are little-known and have been largely hidden from the public eye. Elizabeth Hallam here investigates the anatomy museum and how it reveals the fascination and fears that surround the dead body in Western societies. Hallam explores the history of these museums and how they operate in the current cultural environment. Their regulated access increasingly clashes with evolving public mores toward the exposed body, as demonstrated by the international popularity of the Body Worlds exhibition. The book examines such related topics as artistic works that employ the images of dead bodies and the larger ongoing debate over the disposal of corpses. Issues such as aesthetics and science, organ and body donations, and the dead body in Western religion and ritual are also discussed here in fascinating depth. The Anatomy Museum unearths a strange and compelling cultural history that investigates the ideas of preservation, human rituals of death, and the spaces that our bodies occupy in this life and beyond.

Written by a museum professional and based on a course taught for many years, The Anatomy of a Museum is an engaging and accessible volume that provides a unique insider’s guide to what museums are and how they operate. An insider’s view of the rarefied world of the museum that provides a refreshing and unique account of the reality of the workings of museum life The material has been successfully tested in a course that the author has taught for 14 years Miller has extensive experience at all levels of museum work, from painting walls for exhibitions to museum directorship Clearly and engagingly written, the book covers all the component parts and various disciplines of museum operations, and opinions and perspectives are drawn from a deep knowledge of the field Includes useful pedagogical material, including questions, discussion topics, and a range of anecdotes

Offering insight into nineteenth- and early twentieth-century medical school dissecting rooms and anatomy museums, this book explores how collected human remains have shaped Western biomedical knowledge and attitudes towards the body. To explore the role Australia played in the narrative of Western medical development, Pacitti focuses on how and why Australian anatomists and medical students obtained human body parts. As medical knowledge circulated between Australia and Britain, the colony's physicians conformed to established specimen collecting practices and diverged from them to form a distinct medical identity. Interrogating how these literal and figurative bones of contention have left an indelible mark on the nation's medical profession, collecting institutions, and communities, Pacitti sheds new light on our understanding of Western medical networks and reveals the opportunities and challenges historic specimen collections pose in the present day. The Body Collected in Australia is a cultural history of collectors and collections that deepens our understanding of the ways the living have used the dead to comprehend the intricacies of the human body in illness and good health.

Museum Matters tells the story of Mexico's national collections through the trajectories of its objects. The essays in this book show the many ways in which things matter and affect how Mexico imagines its past, present, and future.