The Body Emblazoned: Dissection and the Human Body in Renaissance Culture

Rating:
Summary: solid, but winged
Review: I'm surprised that this book has not already been rated by some enthusiastic reader. This is a book which deserves a wider readership. Written is a style that is decidely British, it flows with weight and grace. The content of this book is as the title would have it, but sheds insight into so much more. It is not about the science of Anatomy so much as it is about the (anti-)religious undercurrents that drove the West to embark upon this macabre science. The making of the paradigm of Western science--an apotheosis of the Platonic Idea made material-- can be seen here: The object of its study, for the West, must be dead, and unmoving. The author's depiction of the rise of Anatomy as a Science makes one aware that the European conquest of the Americas, for example, started out in a manner that is so "anatomical": Kill first(the Mayas, for example), then dissect and classify. (I recommend reading Eduardo Galeano's Trilogy as a running commetary to Sawday's great work.) The whole epistemological structure of Western science and Myth is laid bare on the operating table presided over by the good doctor Vesalius, whose name means "Weasle". On the table? You guessed it. An accidental meeting of a sewing machine and an umbrella: That rendezvous posing as a woman (Eve, really), exposing. bloodlessly, her intestines to show the Labyrinth of the World, who will be reincarnated several hundred years later as Breton's "Nadja". It is a coincidence of the most cabalistic kind to note that the year Vesalius publishes his work on Anatomy, Kepler publishes his work on the Orbit of the Planets. Both men were interested in Labyriths and the number 4.

Rating:
Summary: The Renaissance anatomized
Review: The Body Emblazoned is a wide-ranging History of what the Author terms the Renaissance Culture of Dissection. In so doing, its medical, scientific, philosophical, sociological, legal and artistic aspects are opened and cut up for our perusal. The Author demonstrates how the nature of the practice of anatomy changed over the period from, in his analogy, a voyage of discovery to a kind of colonisation through taxonomy, a classification and naming of parts. We are shown a sea-change in understanding, as the prevailing model for the body's inner workings was transformed from Microcosm to Mechanism. Along the way, we learn of the many difficulties in obtaining cadavers for dissection, of the curious architecture of anatomy theatres, and of how Rembrandt and Descartes might have met in the butchers' shops of 17th century Amsterdam. Mr. Sawday's Lit. Crit. background serves him well in his penetrating analyses of anatomical reference in the works of Spenser, Donne, Carew, Cavendish and Traherne, among others, but elsewhere it seems obtrusive, in the guise of barely relevant references to Freud, Deleuze and Joyce, for example, and in a somewhat irritating overuse of inverted 'commas'. Another irritation is the Author's heavy-handed moralizing: he is too anxious to spell out how oppressive, or misogynist, or cruel are the opinions and actions of the anatomists and their ilk: in my opinion such observations have more force when readers are left to draw their own moral conclusions. That said, one by no means has to agree with a book in order to enjoy it, and this one never lost my interest. It is a most intelligent and stimulating work, skilfully presented and nicely illustrated too.

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