The history of printing—from the Bible and religious pamphlets to electioneering flyers dropped from drones—can be told through the history of illustration—most recently shown in DART through the book, This Is What Democracy Looked Like: A visual History of the Printed Ballot.

So consider the human body: the physical envelope that encases the mind and spirit of an individual. The flesh that inspires love or dread, and sometimes both. The physical being that is nurtured and conditioned into an object of beauty, or not. The machine that somehow carries the individual through the passages of life, through the extremes of pleasure and pain, enlightenment and horror, reflection and regret. 

As a machine, the human body can be, for artists and illustrators, a subject of intense scrutiny and study. In recent years, figure drawing classes have mushroomed into an urban pastime right up there with book clubs and Thursday night meetups. Now online figure drawing, with Zoom, is everywhere, seemingly at all times of the day and night. There are even some, like Jean-Antoine Norbert’s exceptional Saturday sessions, that offer a one-hour anatomy lesson prior to the model drawing.

So when I discovered the extraordinary Dream Anatomy  website, folded into the National Library of Medicine website, I was enthralled. This beautifully presented exploration of the interrelated histories of anatomical art, science, technology, and yes—printing—reminds us that there are many ways to explore the hidden wonders of the interior of the human body. In looking through the hundreds of examples of anatomical and dissection art, we can explore the mechanics of why we appear as we do, and to imagine the intricate and sensitive workings of our parts—the stuff that also governs how we feel at any moment.

The Library, which has a collection of original materials chronicling the healing professions as far back as the eleventh century, has been described as “the jewel in the crown of the U.S. Public Health Service." The curator, Michael Sappol, had long wanted to use the collection as the basis of an exhibition, so when a hiatus in the Library’s regular exhibition schedule occurred, he and his team developed, in considerable haste, an exhibition on the history of anatomical representation.

The book came well after the close of the show, allowing its authors to reflect on the carefully annotated comments of visitors to the exhibition. Elizabeth Fee, Chief, History of Medicine Division at the Library writes, “Dream Anatomy invites you to look and think twice about the anatomical body and its relation to self. The appeal of the topic—anatomy, anatomical representation, the anatomical conception of self, whether treated historically, aesthetically, or scientifically—is evidenced by the wave of anatomical exhibition that …attract record-setting crowds….The history of anatomy, Dream Anatomy argues, is everybody’s history….

The Dream Anatomy exhibition opened at the Library on October 9, 2002 and ran until July 31, 2003. Many of the images featured in the exhibition, and in the catalogue, can be found on the World WideWeb at the following sites: 

Dream Anatomy http://www.nlm.nih.gov/dreamanatomy 

Historical Anatomies On the Web http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/historicalanatomies Turning the Pages http://archive.nlm.nih.gov/proj/ttp/intro.htm 

Images In the History of Medicine http://www.ihm.nlm.nih.gov 

Anatauest (Visible Human Project images) http://anatauest.nlm.nih.gov 

Michael Sappol lives in Stockholm, Sweden and is a senior fellow at the Swedish Collegium for Advanced Study, Uppsala. For many years he was a historian, exhibition curator and scholar-in-residence in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine (USA). His work focuses on the history of anatomy, death, and the visual culture of medicine in film, illustration and exhibition. He is the author of books including A Traffic of Dead Bodies (2002) and Dream Anatomy (2006),  and curator of a number of exhibitions, including Once & Future Web (2000), Dream Anatomy (2003) and Visible Proofs (2006). His new book is Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration and the Homuncular Subject (University of Minnesota Press, 2017).