Sir Charles Bell (1774–1842) was a medical reformer in a great age of reform—an occasional and reluctant vivisectionist, a theistic popularizer of natural science, a Fellow of the Royal Society, a surgeon, an artist, and a teacher. He was among the last of a generation of medical men who strove to fashion a particularly British science of medicine; who formed their careers, their research, and their publications through the private classrooms of nineteenth-century London; and whose politics were shaped by the exigencies of developing a living through patronage in a time when careers in medical science simply did not exist. A decade after Bell’s death, that world was gone, replaced by professionalism, standardized education, and regular career paths. In Charles Bell and the Anatomy of Reform, Carin Berkowitz takes readers into Bell’s world, helping us understand the life of medicine before the modern separation of classroom, laboratory, and clinic. Through Bell’s story, we witness the age when modern medical science, with its practical universities, set curricula, and medical professionals, was born.

First edition of Bell's (1774-1842) important study of the anatomy and physiology of facial expression. The expressions, attitudes, and movements of the human body had always interested scientists as well as artists, but never before had thy been treated with such depth and conciseness. The work reflects Bell's brilliance as both artist and anatomist, and inspired Darwin's own Expression of the Emotions (1872), which he described Bell as one of the founders of the subject as a branch of science. Reyolds, 404, Wellcome, II, p.135, B & L Rootenberg,1987

Incl. illust. and maps - Buddhism, China, Tibet, History