The Body Beyond the Anatomy Lab: (Re)Addressing Arts Methodologies for the Critical Medical Humanities

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachael Allen
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Anatomy ◽  
Anatomical Dissection ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
Special Knowledge ◽  
Human Dissection ◽  
Anatomy Lab

Bearing witness to these anatomies ‘in the flesh’ is rooted in the cultural history of human anatomy and dissection: the meeting of artists and anatomists around the dissecting table; the public spectacle of ritualised dissections in Renaissance anatomical theatres; the study of anatomy in institutions; the contentious display of dead bodies in Gunther von Hagen’s Body Worlds, to name a few. Our bodies have commonly been understood by both medical and lay people as a biological machine of sorts and an image ‘embedded in popular culture and sustained in the anatomy lab’. First-hand experience of anatomical dissection has become a guarded professional ritual and a marker of special knowledge that depends on the violation of the taboo (access to the interior of the body and to death): ‘The anatomy theatre lies at the mysterious heart of medicine in the public fantasy and the professional imagination.’ Categorical, turbulent and romantic accounts of human dissection have circulated widely over the centuries, through prose, poetry and the arts, and it is precisely because of the body’s moral centrality that it can be used subversively by contemporary artists today.

scholarly journals Post-Mortem Pedagogy: A Brief History of the Practice of Anatomical Dissection

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connor T. A. Brenna ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Medical Education ◽  
Clinical Medicine ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Anatomy ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Anatomical Dissection ◽  
Anatomical Knowledge ◽  
History Of ◽  
Increasing Demand ◽  
Human Dissection

Anatomical dissection is almost ubiquitous in modern medical education, masking a complex history of its practice. Dissection with the express purpose of understanding human anatomy began more than two millennia ago with Herophilus, but was soon after disavowed in the third century BCE. Historical evidence suggests that this position was based on common beliefs that the body must remain whole after death in order to access the afterlife. Anatomical dissection did not resume for almost 1500 years, and in the interim anatomical knowledge was dominated by (often flawed) reports generated through the comparative dissection of animals. When a growing recognition of the utility of anatomical knowledge in clinical medicine ushered human dissection back into vogue, it recommenced in a limited setting almost exclusively allowing for dissection of the bodies of convicted criminals. Ultimately, the ethical problems that this fostered, as well as the increasing demand from medical education for greater volumes of human dissection, shaped new considerations of the body after death. Presently, body bequeathal programs are a popular way in which individuals offer their bodies to medical education after death, suggesting that the once widespread views of dissection as punishment have largely dissipated.

scholarly journals Bastidores da anatomia: da história à essência humana

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 114
Author(s):  
Isabela Pereira Almeida ◽  
Andressa Karoline Da silva Malheiro ◽  
Zara Dantas Oliveira
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Human Body ◽  
The Body ◽  
Human Anatomy ◽  
Present Moment ◽  
The Arts ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Anatomy ◽  
Human Care ◽  
The Grotesque

INTRODUCTION: The history of Anatomy, its artistic representation and the history of the human body, with its taboos, have come a long way until the present moment. The objective of this work is to understand the historical points of this area of knowledge, as well as the subjectivity involved, correlating it with Literature and the Arts. DEVELOPMENT: The production of anatomical knowledge begins in prehistory; it is watertight in the Middle Ages; gains momentum in Oriental Medicine and reaches its peak in spectacles of public dissections. Anatomy is established as a form of entertainment through the regulation of public dissections, leading to the trivialization of death, the appreciation of the grotesque, the scarcity of corpses and the fear of misappropriation of bodies. As anatomy has grown as an area of knowledge, it has created the basis for health sciences and human care. It has emerged over time that the study of anatomical pieces requires essential principles - sensitivity, ethics and respect - and allows us to reflect on the transposition of the boundaries between the beautiful versus the grotesque; the pleasant versus the disgusting. It also allows reflection on the trivialization, commercialization and eroticization of the body, as well as on the limits of science. CONCLUSION: Human anatomy, in its multiple aspects, has come a long way and constitutes a precious source of knowledge, however, it is faced with enticement by the most different interests. It is necessary to rescue the beauty of the human body, which is an inseparable part of the being that inhabits / dwelt there in order to resignify its human essence.

Presentation

2014 ◽  
Vol 2 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Redacción CEIICH
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Social Reality ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Social ◽  
Feminist Theories ◽  
History Of

<p class="p1">The third number of <span class="s1"><strong>INTER</strong></span><span class="s2"><strong>disciplina </strong></span>underscores this generic reference of <em>Bodies </em>as an approach to a key issue in the understanding of social reality from a humanistic perspective, and to understand, from the social point of view, the contributions of the research in philosophy of the body, cultural history of the anatomy, as well as the approximations queer, feminist theories and the psychoanalytical, and literary studies.</p>

Emotions in performance: Poetry and preaching

2017 ◽  
Vol 54 (1) ◽  
pp. 67-102
Author(s):  
Carla Petievich ◽  
Max Stille
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Rhetorical Analysis ◽  
Cultural Tradition ◽  
Public Performance ◽  
The Public ◽  
Collective Emotions ◽  
Performance Poetry ◽  
Performance Traditions ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Nation State

Emotions are largely interpersonal and inextricably intertwined with communication; public performances evoke collective emotions. This article brings together considerations of poetic assemblies known as ‘mushāʿira’ in Pakistan with reflections on sermon congregations known as ‘waʿz mahfil’ in Bangladesh. The public performance spaces and protocols, decisive for building up collective emotions, exhibit many parallels between both genres. The cultural history of the mushāʿira shows how an elite cultural tradition has been popularised in service to the modern nation state. A close reading of the changing forms of reader address shows how the modern nazm genre has been deployed for exhorting the collective, much-expanded Urdu public sphere. Emphasising the sensory aspects of performance, the analysis of contemporary waʿz mahfils focuses on the employment of particular chanting techniques. These relate to both the transcultural Islamic soundsphere and Bengali narrative traditions, and are decisive for the synchronisation of listeners’ experience and a dramaticisation of the preachers’ narratives. Music-rhetorical analysis furthermore shows how the chanting can evoke heightened emotional experiences of utopian Islamic ideology. While the scrutinised performance traditions vary in their respective emphasis on poetry and narrative, they exhibit increasingly common patterns of collective reception. It seems that emotions evoked in public performances cut across ‘religious’, ‘political’, and ‘poetic’ realms—and thereby build on and build up interlinkages between religious, aesthetic and political collectives.

The Hurt(ful) Body

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Art History ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Dialectical Approach ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theatre Studies

This book offers a cross-disciplinary approach to pain and suffering in the early modern period, based on research in the fields of literary studies, art history, theatre studies, cultural history and the study of emotions. It has a sustained focus on visual sources, textual material and documents about actual events rather than well-known thinkers or ‘masterpieces’ of art history, and a preference for cases and historical contexts over systematic theory-building. The hurt(ful) body brings under discussion visual and performative representations of embodied pain, using an insistently dialectical approach that takes into account the perspective of the hurt body itself, the power and afflictions of its beholder and, finally, the routinising and redeeming of hurt within institutional contexts. The volume’s two-fold approach of the hurt body, defining ‘hurt’ both from the perspective of the victim and the beholder (as well as their combined creation of a gaze), is unique. It establishes a double perspective about the riddle of ‘cruel’ viewing by tracking the shifting cultural meanings of victims’ bodies, and confronting them to the values of audiences, religious and popular institutional settings, and practices of punishment. It encompasses both the victim’s presence as an image or performed event of pain and the conundrum of the look – the transmitted ‘pain’ experienced by the watching audience. This will be done through three rubrics: the early modern performing body, beholder or audience responses, and the operations of institutional power. Because of its interdisciplinary approach of the history of pain and the hurt(ful) body, the book will be of interest for Lecturers and students from different fields, like the history of ideas, the history of the body, urban history, theatre studies, literary studies, art history, emotion studies and performance studies

The Emotive Object in Medieval China

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 56-95
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Moser
Keyword(s):  
Cultural History ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Conceptual Structures ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Medieval China ◽  
Northern Song ◽  
History Of ◽  
Philosophical Texts ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Grave Goods

Abstract This article considers the emotional status of grave goods in medieval China. Its purpose is twofold. First, the author investigates the conceptual structures available for interpreting the emotional processes involved in medieval burials. He argues that it is possible, and indeed productive, to read grave goods as traces of emotional operations and, in so doing, to articulate a dimension of the embodied processes that structured and motivated wider developments in the social and cultural history of China. Second, the author demonstrates how sensory-based analyses of grave goods can elucidate intermediating processes among the conceptualization of emotion in philosophical texts, the representation of emotion in the literary and visual arts, and the actual experience of emotion in premodern China. Using the recently discovered cemetery of the Northern Song Lü family as a case study, he articulates the emotional function of the aesthetic appreciation that occurred when selecting objects for burial. In explaining the relationship between the sensorial affect of the grave goods and the family's commitment to the abstract ideal of sincerity, the author uses the concept of the emotive object to chart common ground for histories of thought and the arts in China.

scholarly journals Men of Parts: Masculine Embodiment and the Male Leg in Eighteenth-Century England

2015 ◽  
Vol 54 (4) ◽  
pp. 797-821 ◽  
Author(s):  
Karen Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Sexual Difference ◽  
Visual Representations ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approach ◽  
The Body ◽  
Material Objects ◽  
Sex And Gender ◽  
The Public ◽  
History Of ◽  
And Gender

AbstractThis essay explores changes in eighteenth-century male clothing in the context of the history of sexual difference, gender roles, and masculinity. The essay contributes to a history of dress by reconstructing a range of meanings and social practices through which men's clothing was understood by its consumers. Furthermore, critically engaging with work on the “great male renunciation,” the essay argues that the public authority that accrued to men through their clothing was based not on a new image of a rational disembodied man but instead on an emphasis on the male anatomy and masculinity as intrinsically embodied. Drawing on findings from the material objects of eighteenth-century clothing, visual representations, and evidence from the archival records of male consumers, the essay adopts an interdisciplinary approach that allows historians to study sex and gender as embodied, rather than simply performed. In so doing, the essay not only treats “embodiment” as an historical category but also responds to recent shifts in the historical discipline and the wider academy towards a more corporealist approach to the body.

Writing Cultural History in Early Modern Europe: Christophe Milieu and his Project

1999 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 342-365
Author(s):  
Donald R. Kelley
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Cultural History ◽  
Early Modern Europe ◽  
Philosophy And Literature ◽  
The Arts ◽  
The World ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Comprehensive History

AbstractChristophe Milieu's De Scribenda Vniversitatis rervm historia libri qvinqve (Basel, 1551) interprets the "universe of things" (universitas return) within an evolutionary and historical framework consisting of five connected and progressive "grades" (gradus) of existence accessible to human understanding: nature (natura), the world of God's creation and man's animal aspect; prudence (prudentia), including the arts of survival; government (principatus), the stage of civil society and political history; wisdom (sapientia), equivalent to civilization and including the higher sciences and philosophy; and literature (litetatura), in which knowledge of the preceding phases of "progress" (progressio) is expressed in writing. Milieu's "narrative" constitutes a pioneering and comprehensive history of western culture.

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