Dr. Mütter's Marvels by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz

Hansen describes, “In the anatomical theater, which was lit by scented candles to augment the dim light drawn from windows and sometimes featured music played by a flutist…they took on a festive and theatrical atmosphere.” The use of the words theater and theatrical is entirely appropriate the dissections were a form of entertainment. It was born of the anatomical amphitheaters of the Renaissance, where public dissections were held a few times per year to expose the “secrets of Nature revealed by God.” For the price of admission, one could watch as doctors performed an autopsy on the body of a convict. One might conclude that we are having a moment with the morbid.īut this type of voyeurism is hardly new, and the surgical theater is one of the more glaring examples. We also post and pin gruesome pictures from digital collections of historical medical images gaze at exhibits of pathological waxworks tune in to televised live brain surgery and read books like Richard Barnett’s The Sick Rose: Disease and the Art of Medical Illustration (2014) and his recent follow-up, Crucial Interventions: An Illustrated Treatise on the Principles & Practice of Nineteenth-Century Surgery (2015).

The scene is ghastly to watch, and yet, we do.

Once he slices her underbelly and the blood begins to gush, however, his audience-both those in the room and we at home-realizes that success still eludes the surgeon. The anatomical theater was lit by scented candles to augment the dim light drawn from windows and sometimes featured music played by a flutist.

Dr. Mütter's Marvels by Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz