A Brill Calendar: February 24

An Aid to Medical Science

Few connoisseurs of graphic arts would object to the appraisal that anatomical drawings as they were engraved, printed and published for medical aims & purposes in Europe - from the 16th century onwards until well into the 19th - often surpass their scholarly aim to inform and demonstrate; entering the domain of pure aesthetic beauty.

As long as the very idea of ‘writing with light’ – photography – was preposterous, co-operation between medical doctors, draughtsmen and printer-publishers was needed in depicting minutely the intimate fabric of the human body. And this at a time that surgery continued to be faced by traditional inhibitions concerning opening the physical container of God’s own gift, the all-important immaterial soul.

By the time Herman Boerhaave (1668 – 1738) made Leyden the capital city of the medical world in Europe, attracting scholars from all over Europe, the three types of expertise needed for superior anatomical productions in print were present, available and mature. But it is seldom that as fine a specimen of this genre had been published as a work on the human skeleton and its muscles; entitled ‘Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani’ (1747), this project was realized by Professor Bernard Siegfried Albinus (Frankfurt an der Oder, February 24 1697 – Leyden, September 9, 1770), who occupied a Chair of Anatomy, Surgery and Medicine. Albinus, virtuoso of the lancet, couldn’t have produced it without the art of a virtuoso of drawing and engraving, his ‘assistant’, Jan Wandelaar.

By the middle of the 18th century, medical scholars were well aware of earlier achievements in their various disciplines and of the fact that they were standing on the shoulders of giants preceding them. Together with his revered Boerhaave, Albinus, a founder of modern anatomy, edited the seminal works of Andreas Vesalius (1514 – 1564) and William Harvey (1578 – 1657).