More than the treasures of Tutankhamen's tomb, more even than the latest impressionist blockbuster, the most visited show on earth is the display of plastinated cadavers prepared by the German anatomist Gunther von Hagens. What attracts fee-paying visitors in their millions to stare at these spectacularly revealed human innards is the subject of Michael Sappol's marvellously compelling book, namely a renewed recognition of the fact that we all think of ourselves as “anatomical beings”. I confess I picked up this book without great enthusiasm. Having myself been responsible for a number of medical exhibitions that have showcased anatomical images, I was doubtful if yet another treatment of anatomy's aesthetic surface could add much to what Martin Kemp, Deanna Petherbridge and Andrea Carlino, amongst many others, have already shown us. Like these earlier studies, Dream anatomy takes us through a parade of the science's greatest hits. But there is nonetheless something distinctive and important about this visual essay, and it lies in Sappol's unblinking focus on the emotional potency—the undiluted joy—of “the anatomical imagination”. His thesis is unambiguous: having initially prompted the mutual enrichment of art and science, anatomical illustrations later became the terrain upon which they were “defined in opposition to each other”. In Sappol's golden, pre-modern age, anatomical images provided humanity with a moral mirror and probe—a playful and dramatic canvas upon which cadavers teased viewers by delicately draping their own skin, cavorting with props, making dramatic poses and dancing as only the dead know how. Then, from the end of the seventeenth century, the pleasure of early anatomy came to be seen as a problem: “play and the pursuit of truth became incompatible”. In order to turn it into a serious science of the real, the dreamy “art” of anatomy had to be squeezed into the margins—images of dissected bodies were quite literally stretched to fill the entire visual surface of a plate or figure, leaving no room for plots, gestures, props and fun. By 1800, the fantastical aspects of anatomy had been downgraded as merely “frivolous”, banished to the extraneous realms of academic, moral and historical art, popular health and science education, political cartoons, films, fiction and, most recently, contemporary art. Inevitably the details of his story are more complicated. For one thing, anatomical images were mostly the result of collaborations between two artists: one brandishing a pencil, the other a scalpel. Plotting the balance of power and fame between them reveals fascinating insights into instances of stylistic evolution. Printing innovations also influenced the direction of change. But it was another form of technology (the camera obscura) that suggested photographic accuracy as the most compelling visual ideal; with the resulting “relentless gaze” being perfectly embodied in the collaborative work of Jan van Riemsdyk and William Hunter, whose images almost terrorize their subjects. These new conventions of realism also encouraged artists to disentangle primary anatomical details from secondary elements of symbolism and morally suggestive contexts. Bernhard Albinus’ anatomical atlases of the 1740s, for example, with their lavish backgrounds of wild life were reprinted thirty years later without accompanying rhinoceroses and the like. Each passing style, each step in the process of “getting real”, is clearly mourned by Sappol. Efforts to give viewers unmediated access to exactly what artist–anatomists saw, inevitably, he suggests, led to pictures that were decreasingly pleasing to look at. Produced some three years after the exhibition of the same name, Dream anatomy is itself a philosophical reflection upon a set of images now packed away in the drawers and shelves of a library. It works more through repeated visual assertions than any substantially marshalled body of evidence, and offers very little by way of explanation about what propelled these unfortunate changes: some combination of theology, epistemology, and economics he briefly speculates. Even the question of who bought these atlases and prints and why, or indeed who supported their production, is barely remarked upon. But none of this matters, for it is not his subject. Instead Sappol has treated us to a passionate account of some of the most astonishing incarnations of anatomical inspiration, and for that we should be very grateful.