The Whiteness of Bones: Sceletopoeia and the Human Body in Early Modern Europe.

In Western Europe between 1500 and 1700 the human skeleton became an object: a scientific object, a natural object, an artistic object, an artisanal object, independent of its bodily origins yet retaining a troubling moral status. The act of making a skeleton created a scientific object that also had aesthetic value, with qualities of authenticity, accuracy, and whiteness. Beginning with Vesalius, many anatomists included instructions on how to make a skeleton in their anatomical texts, and many more taught their students how to do this. Skeletons became central to anatomical instruction, both for medicine and for art. By the end of the seventeenth century, skeletons increasingly were found in cabinets and collections, and their aesthetic qualities, particularly their whiteness, became critical. However, the emotional and moral impacts of making skeletons remained unspoken.

Animals, vaccines, and COVID-19.

Animals, especially mammals, have played a critical role in the COVID-19 pandemic. The COVID-19 virus originated in animals, and the virus can jump back and forth between humans and animals. Moreover, animals have been central to the development of the various vaccines against the virus now employed around the world, continuing a long history. The interrelationships between animals and humans in both disease transmission and its prevention call for an interdisciplinary approach to medicine.

Retrospectives: Unconventional paths.

I am the first to admit that my career has not followed a conventional path. But in talking to my colleagues, I am not sure that there is a conventional path to an academic career. This retrospective is both a look at how the profession has changed over the forty years since I began graduate school in the late 1970s, and a reflection on my own trajectory within that profession. Historiographical references reflect my own views and are not meant to be comprehensive. I first discovered the history of science as an undergraduate history major at Connecticut College in the early 1970s. The course of physics for non-majors I took with David Fenton was based on Harvard Project Physics, which had been developed in the 1960s by two professors of science education, F. James Rutherford and Fletcher G. Watson, and the historian of science Gerald Holton. We actually wrote term papers for the class; mine was on the theory that Stonehenge was an astronomical observatory.

Experiments, causation, and the uses of vivisection in the first half of the seventeenth century.

Defining experiment was particularly vexed in the realm of anatomical dissection and vivisection. Was dissection merely descriptive, or something more? Harvey's discovery of the circulation of the blood and Aselli's discovery of the so-called lacteal veins shaped much anatomical research between the late 1620s and the 1650s. While the techniques of dissection and vivisection gained wide use, there was much debate on the validity of the circulation in particular, and its relationship to the lacteal veins. Critics, particularly the French anatomist Jean Riolan, but also the natural philosopher Pierre Gassendi, focused on the lack of causation in Harvey's method and the lack of medical use and not on his use of vivisection. Jean Pecquet's discovery of the thoracic duct in 1651 changed the terms of the debate by definitively connecting the circulation with the lacteals. Riolan's critiques of Pecquet in the 1650s show profoundly differing notions of the purpose of dissection. While Gassendi eventually accepted Harvey's concept of the circulation, Riolan never did.

Introduction: experimenting with animals in the early modern era.

The aim of this special issue is to address issues surrounding the use of live animals in experimental procedures in the pre-modern era, with a special emphasis on the technical, anatomical, and philosophical sides. Such use raises philosophical, scientific, and ethical questions about the nature of life, the reliability of the knowledge acquired, and animal suffering.

Health, national character and the English diet in 1700.

By 1750, the 'roast beef of Old England' had become a byword. Half a century earlier, however, debate raged about the appropriate diet for the English temperament, a term laden with medical as well as political implications. John Evelyn's Acetaria (1699, 2nd ed. 1706) valorized a rural society that subsisted mostly on vegetables, while the physician Martin Lister's preface to his edition of the Roman cookery book of Apicius (1705) praised the imperial Roman diet and its use of sauces and spices as healthful. The Grub Street writer William King satirized Lister in The Art of Cookery (1708), claiming that a pre-Roman British diet of grilled meats was the most suited to the English character. But the politics of meat-eating was complex: Evelyn's emphasis on vegetables had earlier been endorsed by the radical Thomas Tryon, while the Royal Society stalwart Edward Tyson argued that although the human body seemed best suited for a vegetable diet, human free will trumped nature.

The king's animals and the king's books: the illustrations for the Paris Academy's Histoire des animaux.

This essay explores the place of natural philosophy among the patronage projects of Louis XIV, focusing on the Mémoires pour servir a l'histoire naturelle des animaux (or Histoire des animaux) of the 1670s, one of a number of works of natural philosophy to issue from Louis XIV's printing house. Questions particular to the Histoire des animaux include the interaction between text and image, the credibility and authority of images of exotic animals, and the relationship between comparative anatomy and natural history, and between human and animal anatomy. At the same time that the Histoire des animaux contributed to Jean-Baptiste Colbert's management of patronage and of Louis's image, it was a work of natural philosophy, representing the collaborative efforts of the new Paris Academy of Sciences. It examined natural history and comparative anatomy in new ways, and its illustrations broke new ground in their depiction of animals in a natural setting. However, the lavishly formatted books were presentation volumes and did not gain wide circulation until their republication in 1733. Sources consulted include Colbert's manuscript memoires on the royal printers and engravers.

Theatrical anatomy: Duverney in Paris, 1670-1720.

During the reign of Louis XIV, anatomical demonstrations became a public attraction in Paris. At the Jardin du Roi, the star performer was Joseph-Guichard Duverney, who attracted hundreds to his anatomy lectures. Simultaneously, Duverney also instructed the Dauphin and his courtiers, lectured to medical students at the Hôtel-Dieu hospital (making off with corpses in the process) and dissected before the Paris Academy of Sciences. Duverney's dramatic, rhetorical and anatomical skills made him the best-known man of science in Louis XIV's Paris.

Anatomists and entrepreneurs in early eighteenth-century London.

Anatomical demonstration in the eighteenth century took place in many formats. In this essay I discuss public anatomical demonstration as performed by entrepreneurial anatomists in London between 1700 and 1740. These anatomists offered courses, advertised in newspapers, to anyone who was willing to pay. In contrast to courses offered in official settings to prospective physicians and surgeons, these courses emphasized natural philosophy and natural theology rather than practical knowledge. Entrepreneurial lecturers also aimed to entertain. In this article I examine the lectures of James Douglas, William Cheselden, and Frank Nicholls, each of whom differed significantly from the others in style and content but were all anatomical entrepreneurs. All of them, moreover, employed not only human cadavers but also living and dead animals in their lessons. I examine the content of the lectures and the motivations of the lecturers' audiences. I also argue that the prevailing historiographical representation of eighteenth-century science as "polite" requires considerable revision to accommodate as impolite an activity as public anatomy.

Duverney's skeletons.

In 1730, shortly before his death, the Paris anatomist Joseph-Guichard Duverney wrote his will, leaving his anatomical specimens to the Académie des Sciences, of which he was a member. But the will was disputed by Pierre Chirac, supervisor of the Jardin du Roi where Duverney, as professor of anatomy, had performed most of the dissections that produced the specimens. The ensuing debate between Chirac and René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur, arguing for the Académie, reveals the tensions surrounding both the concept of intellectual property in this period and the collective enterprise in natural philosophy. The differing roles and audiences of the Académie and the Jardin were central to this debate. In addition, this essay explores the origins and significance of the anatomical specimens themselves and their changing role in instruction and display, as well as the transition from the cabinet of curiosities to the natural history museum.