Human dissection poetry

While human dissection, anatomists and bones in the body may seem like unlikely sources of art in a contemporary setting, for centuries, it was normal for philosophers, artists, writers and poets to be inspired by the world of cutting up the dead.

It was everywhere.

For example, British poet John Donne (1572 - 1631) often referred to dissection. His “Love’s Exchange” includes his fantasies of being on the dissector's slab:

For this Love is enraged with me,

Yet kills not ; if I must example be

To future rebels, if th' unborn

Must learn by my being cut up and torn,

Kill, and dissect me, Love ; for this

Torture against thine own end is ;

Rack'd carcasses make ill anatomies.

Edward Ravenscroft’s 1696 play The Anatomist; or the sham doctor featured a corpse coming to life and protesting against its own anatomisation. The play was a comedy.

Jumping forward a few hundred years or so, University of Queensland medical students in the 1930s used to pen witty ditties about dissection. One was sung to the tune of ‘Clementine’:

In the back street, you can see feet,

Skin and bones and intestine,

Being tangled, cut and mangled,

By the blokes in Medicine.

I find it curious that although we live in an era where the body feels so central in discourse, and that we can see so much more with CT scans and ultrasounds, dissection and the body’s interior world is absent from cultural discourse as a source of inspiration. If anything, it’s seen as revolting, dirty, creepy. Perhaps it’s because science and the anatomists have totally taken over and closed the doors to the anatomy lab? Perhaps the med students are singing ditties but they do it quietly at lunch.

Not sure how to prise anatomy’s doors open again. Imagine what we’d learn if we let the arts back in.

#History of Anatomy, #Anatomical Discoveries #Medical History # Anatomical Illustrations # Evolution of Medical Science #Historical Medical Practices #Dissection History #Anatomy in Art and Science