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Dissecting the Erotic: Art and Sexuality in Mid-Victorian Medical Anatomy

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Dissecting the Erotic: Art and Sexuality in Mid-Victorian Medical Anatomy DISSECTING THE EROTIC: ART AND SEXUALITY IN MID-VICTORIAN MEDICAL ANATOMY by MEREDITH MCINNIS B.A., The University of British Columbia, 2006 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (History) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) June 2008 © Meredith McInnis, 2008 ABSTRACT In the mid-nineteenth century, anatomical illustration in England underwent a crisis of representation. Moral authorities were growing increasingly concerned with the proliferation of images of the naked body and the effects they might have on public “decency.” The anatomical profession was sensitive to this hostile climate to nude representations. In the years immediately preceding the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 that defined the category of “pornography,” anatomical illustration was being purged of sexual connotations as part of an attempt to consolidate medicine as a respectable “profession.” In the eyes of this new professional body, there was no space for sexual associations in anatomical texts. Artistic medical anatomy’s rejection was driven by its links to problematic erotic traditions. Specifically, anatomy’s proximity to pseudo-medical pornography, the same- sex eroticism of the Hellenic tradition, and the problem of the male and female nude in “high art” were at issue. In representing the naked body artistically, anatomists brought their illustrations into dangerous proximity with these traditions. By systematically putting the work of one Victorian anatomist, Joseph Maclise, into dialogue with these erotic traditions, it becomes clear that medicine was not isolated from the broader sexual culture. This study demonstrates that viewing publics and viewing practices are historically specific and are brought into being by the interaction of visual phenomena by emphasizing the fluidity between representational fields of art, medicine and sexuality. The effort to excise the sexual meanings contained in anatomy ultimately led to the emergence of a new diagrammatic style of anatomical drawing that became the orthodox style of medical illustration, and that persists to this day. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………....ii Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………iii List of Figures…………………………………………………………………………….iv Acknowledgments..………………………………………………………………………vi “Dissecting the Erotic: Art and Sexuality in Mid-Victorian Medical Anatomy”….…..….1 Bibliography.…………………………………………………………………………….57 iii LIST OF FIGURES 1. The External Oblique Muscle. Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical (“Gray’s Anatomy”)………………………………………………………...………………….14 2. Plate 10: The surgical dissection of the sterno-clavicular or tracheal region, and the relative position of its main bloodvessels, nerves, &c. Surgical Anatomy…………..15 3. Plate 65-66: The surgical dissection of the popliteal space and the posterior crural region. Surgical Anatomy……………………………………………………………15 4. Plate 64, fig. 6: Deformities of the urinary bladder-the operations of sounding for stone, of catheterism and of puncturing the bladder above the pubes. Surgical Anatomy………………………………………………………………………………...……..16 5. Plate X: External Views of the Male and Female Organs of Generation. Kalogynomia………………………………………………………………………… 21 6. Plate XVI: Suction and Collapse of the Vagina. Generative System of John Roberton……………………………………………………………………………... 23 7. Plate 8: The surgical dissection of the subclavian and carotid regions, and the relative anatomy of their contents. Surgical Anatomy………………………………………..25 8. Plate 18: The surgical dissection of the wrist and hand. Surgical Anatomy………... 25 9. Plate 7: The surgical dissection of the subclavian and carotid regions, the relative anatomy of their contents. Surgical Anatomy………………………………………..27 10. Plate 26: The relation of the internal parts to the external surface. Surgical Anatomy……………………………………………………………………………...28 11. Plate 11: The surgical dissection of the axillary and brachial regions, displaying the relative order of their contained parts. Surgical Anatomy…………………………... 29 12. Plate 49: The relative anatomy of the male pelvic organs. Surgical Anatomy……….30 13. Plate 48: The relative anatomy of the male pelvic organs. Surgical Anatomy……... 30 14. Plates 66: Surgical dissection of the popliteal space, and the posterior crural region. Surgical Anatomy…………………………………………………………………….32 15. Plate 50: The surgical dissection of the superficial structures of the male perinæum. Surgical Anatomy……………………………………………………………………. 33 iv 16. Plate 13: The surgical form of the male and female axillæ compared. Surgical Anatomy…………………………………………………………………………… 44 17. The Wrestlers. William Etty, ca. 1840………………………………………………. 49 18. Guardsman Higgins. William Etty………………...……………………………….... 50 19. Male nude. Eugènè Durieu, 1853. …………………………………………………………...… 52 20. Plate 23: The relative position of the deeper organs of the thorax and those of the abdomen. Surgical Anatomy …………………………………...……………………52 21. Plate 51: The surgical dissection of the superficial structures of the male perinæum. Surgical Anatomy………………………………………………………...53 v ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to Joy Dixon for her support and her enthusiasm for this project. I would also like to thank Bill French and Maureen Ryan whose insights were instrumental. Thanks as well to Lee Perry at the Woodward Memorial Room and Christine Ruggere at the Johns Hopkins Institute for the History of Medicine. Thank you to the staff, faculty and graduate students in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. I would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding this project. My family has provided unwavering support, and I am appreciative to Frances for pushing my intellectual agenda. Finally, thanks to Andrew. vi Dissecting the Erotic: Art and Sexuality in Mid-Victorian Medical Anatomy In medical anatomy, the interior and exterior of the body are in dialogue. Muscles, veins and arteries, bones and organs that are veiled by the skin are exposed for viewing by the medical gaze. For the mid-nineteenth century surgeon and anatomist, Joseph Maclise (c.1815-1880), the exterior of the body was as pertinent to medical study as the interior. According to Maclise, the “unbroken surface of the human figure is as a map to the surgeon, explanatory of the anatomy arranged beneath.” As he argued in his 1851 anatomy volume Surgical Anatomy, it is impossible to understand the internal body without looking at its external “superficies.”1 At this moment in medicine when anatomical drawing was turning towards the diagrammatic and schematic, Maclise’s valuation of the artistic exterior was an interesting—and puzzling—representational choice. In choosing to represent these “superficies”—the exterior of unclothed male bodies including their faces and skin—Maclise elected to work within a representational field that was full of potential problems. Erotic traditions were associated with all of the representational modes and scripts that were available for drawing the unclothed male body; the erotic legacies of pornographic pseudo-medical texts, Hellenism and the neoclassical aesthetic, and high art nudes made Maclise’s illustrations ambiguous. The images are both erotic and non-erotic and they blur the boundaries between these categories, suggesting a representational fluidity. Representations of anatomical bodies are unstable; they are ostensibly licit, but simultaneously tremble on the edge of the illicit and erotic by virtue of their proximity to these other representational traditions. Thus, in order to protect his professional 1 Joseph Maclise, Surgical Anatomy (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1851), viii. 1 reputation at this moment when medical practitioners were closing ranks as a professional body, Maclise needed to carefully navigate his way through this web of connections. The problem that Maclise faced—the impossibility of completely eliminating erotic interpretations because of the ubiquity of these erotic meanings in representational traditions of the human body—was created by two broader currents. Firstly, it was an issue of what had been seen and continued to linger in the public’s visual consciousness. The publication of several quasi-medical works that deliberately elided the distinction between the medical and the pornographic in the 1820s, The Kalogynomia (1821) and The Generative System of John Roberton (1824 edition), made both doctors and legislators sensitive to the potential overlap between medical texts and pornography. The idea that medicine could be used for erotic stimulation and gratification was highly problematic to these authorities. Secondly, it was an issue of who was doing the looking. The Generative System of John Roberton became controversial only after it was found in the possession of lower class prisoners which suggests the relevance of concerns over class-based viewing practices to the emerging legal definition of obscenity.2 Maclise’s images were not confined to the medical community but seemed to be part of a broader marketplace and the profession received this with unease. By marketing to an elite audience through expensive volumes, use of Latin, and restricting sales to medical students and practitioners, the orthodox medical profession resisted the popularization of anatomy and expressed its anxieties about image circulation. By systematically placing Maclise’s images in dialogue with other images from the representational traditions noted above, it is
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