Anatomical and beautiful

Joseph Maclise, the 19th-century Irish anatomist, surgeon and medical artist drew so many dead and beautiful dissected men. I spent so much time wondering who they were.

What is notable in Maclise's Surgical Anatomy, published in 1851, is how utterly gorgeous and somehow alive the dead young men on the page are. Even though anatomical hooks stretch open their armpits or there is a scalpel on the side of the sketch; they could still be pin-ups, their moody faces, Byronic curls, hands, penises, intestines and torsos so gorgeously rendered that medical historian Michael Sappol now posits that Maclise might possibly have been gay. ‘Maybe they were a space in which he unveiled himself, sent out flares of homoerotic desire,’ said Sappol.

But while these unknown men are stunning to look at, I also wish someone had picked up their bodies from the hospital or the asylum in which they died and given them a proper burial. How sad that it was only in death that these friendless, poor and sick men were transformed into Apollonian gods on the dissectors’ and lithographers’ slabs of stone. If only they’d felt that love when they were alive.

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