Search

This paper arises out of my research which I have been conducting in the context of my dissertation project. It explores the relationship between teaching, research and collecting practices in Viennese anatomy during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. In a time in which Viennese medicine tried to reinvent itself through both the creation of a new curriculum and several other institutional measures the practice of establishing comparative and human anatomical collections can be seen as a strategic key field of action. By concentrating on scientific journals, popular texts, catalogues, correspondences and specimens this paper aims at revealing specific social systems which must be understood as parts of the 'social history' of Viennese anatomy. By looking closely at these social aspects of anatomical teaching and research, this work tries to contribute to recent discussions addressed by historians of science and medicine.

A panel illustrating spinal cord injury in The Dying Lioness in the British Museum dates to 650 BC. This paper outlines the subsequent progression of knowledge of the anatomy of the spinal cord. The animal dissections of Galen are considered because his deductions persisted through the Dark Ages until the late 18th century. Anatomy advanced gradually to yield discoveries of the complex tracts and grey matter elements of the cord and their functions. Amongst many distinguished exponents, the works of Blasius, Huber, Vicq d'Azyr and Stilling are emphasised., ((c) 2008 S. Karger AG, Basel)

Immediately after becoming interested in animal magnetism, and undoubtedly as a result of this interest, E.T.A. Hoffmann used automata as the central characters in some of his most notable works. This paper aims to show how this interest reveals the author's critical attitude towards a conception of the human being which, developing in parallel to anatomy-based medicine, had led in the eighteenth century to a doctrine whose most complete expression is to be found in "L'homme machine," by J.O. De La Mettrie. Nowadays we can see these tales, like those dedicated to animal magnetism, as a cry of alarm against one of the consequences of such a mechanical conception of a human being: the growth of "biopower," or of "biopolitics," terms coined by Foucault in his last works; but also against the risks entailed by the Promethean drive of modernity.

1. We know very little concerning the teaching of anatomy during the Middle Ages. Only two authors, who both came to live in Lyon, Lanfranc and Guy de Chauliac, wrote on the subject. On the other hand, the important development of printing in Lyon from the sixteenth century onwards, made it possible to spread the translations of classic works and most of the books on Anatomy of the Renaissance. 2. However, Lyonese Anatomy developed very slowly because hospital training was more often badly organized. The only true supporter of Anatomy has been Marc Antoine Petit, chief surgeon of the Hôtel-Dieu before the French Revolution. 3. Apart from the parallel but only transient teaching of the Royal College of Surgery, one will have to wait for the creation of an official teaching first assumed by "schools" (secondary school and preparatory school) and finally by the Faculty of Medicine created in 1877. The names of Testut and of Latarjet contributed to the reknown of the Faculty of Medicine by their anatomical studies of great value for several generations of students. 4. Recently the Faculty of Medicine has been divided into four "universities". The new buildings are larger. The "gift of corpses" has brought a remedy to the shortage of the last twenty years. Anatomical research can be pursued thanks to micro-anatomy and bio-mechanics while conventional teaching is completed by dissection.