QUEER ANATOMIES
Aesthetics and Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1700–1900
by Michael Sappol
Bloomsbury Visual Arts.
260 pages, $29.95
A SINEWY MAN stands erect with a serene gaze. He has a massive book propped against his muscular left thigh and he appears to have a toga draped around his body. As I approach this statue (standing in a corner of the chapel of the University of Milan), I realize that he is not just well-defined. Those are actually his muscles and that’s his own skin he’s bearing. In his right hand he holds what remains of a knife; in fact, the one used to flay him. This is St. Bartholomew the Apostle who, legend has it, was martyred by being flayed alive. This is a copy of the 1562 écorché by Marco d’Agate in the cathedral in Milan. It was a fortuitous and startling encounter at the time when I was reading Michael Sappol’s Queer Anatomies: Aesthetics and Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1700 to 1900. Sappol is a cultural historian, a former curator and scholar-in-residence at the National Library of Medicine, and currently a visiting researcher at the Uppsala University, Sweden. Although Sappol’s time frame is post-Renaissance, he cannot help but include several early 17th-century anatomical illustrations. These, like the flayed St. Bartholomew, are beautiful and bizarre: people are depicted in life-like poses drawing back their skin to reveal musculature, internal organs, or even a fetus in situ!
Sappol’s work is lavishly illustrated, deeply scholarly, yet very approachable. It represents a skilled weaving of art history, history of medicine, and queer studies. The anatomical images he presents are highly peculiar—just one of the many connotations of “queer” he uses. My main theoretical criticism of the work is that he has so many applications of “queer” that finally everything is queer and the word is almost vacated of meaning. More on this later.
The mannered, dramatic, or whimsical poses of the dissected bodies are an act of pure artistic fantasy. More generally, anatomical illustrations (even of the monochrome type) do not correspond to what I experienced in Gross Anatomy class. At first encounter, a corpse is gross. Medical students compensate with pranks, cadaver pet names, and other gallows humor. (Sappol discussed this in his 2004 book A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America.) I spent a year with the pungent smell of formaldehyde and, by summer, of melting fat. All the tissues are a monotone taupe. All the innards are covered in fat, sinew, and connective tissue. Where were the distinctive colors of the cleanly outlined organs, nerves, and blood vessels shown in my dissection manual? However, as the year progressed, the medical student’s eye became trained to find order and discover the magnificent construction of the body that illustrators portray. Any reader who’s not vegetarian will have butchered a whole chicken, or carved a turkey, and marveled at the construction of these bodies. In the surgical theater, even more so, the wielder of the scalpel has to envision the idealized forms through the blood and cautery smoke. I have to admit that I became a psychiatrist to avoid the grossness of the human body and instead focus on the alternative fantasies of neuropsychiatric physiology.
I imagine some readers will be repulsed by these images. Sappol opens with a “trigger warning,” and not just because they may be off-putting. He will be pushing us to see their æsthetic seductiveness and, more specifically, their homoerotic appeal (another couple of instantiations of “queerness”). The artistic merit of his selection of prints is evident. (He also includes a few paintings and drawings to bolster his argument about connoisseurs.) Sixteenth-century woodcuts give way to copper plate engravings and mezzotints from the 17th and 18th centuries that are masterworks of the craft—the detail and shading are spectacular! Lithography (invented in 1796) allowed for less costly, yet almost photorealistic, images. Plus, some of the prints were in large formats. Whether included in a book or sold by subscription, they would have been expensive. Who could afford these prints? Sappol argues that wealthy collectors—perhaps mostly physicians and surgeons—had a queer eye for them. Citing a variety of illustrated and print sources, he argues for the queerness of connoisseurship of these bewigged and beribboned gentlemen who gathered to show off their collections. Perhaps it was the origin of the old pickup line: “Come up and see my etchings!” Yet, if all homosocial institutions and gatherings are suspected of being “queer,” then all medical and art schools, as well as most clubs, were hotbeds of homoeroticism until the late 19th century, when women were finally admitted to these fellowships. Maybe they were, who knows?
The challenge for all LGBT historians working on pre-Victorian material is that forbidden genders and sexualities tend to be hidden (unless there were public scandals or arrest records). Sappol has no documentary evidence of homosexuality: no compromising correspondence by anatomists, no anatomical depictions of sodomy, no cum stains on etchings. He does, however, present us with an impressive collection of penises. These are intriguing in their gratuitousness. They are needed when the illustration depicts surgery of the groin, genitals, or urinary system. Otherwise, both male and female genitals were discretely draped. Their inclusion for no educational reason is indeed queer (i.e., unusual). Two male thighs touching each other might save space on the page, or they might be suggestively sexy. Although Sappol doesn’t mention it, even more gratuitous is the depiction of scrotal hairs!
Queer studies has often been an artful exercise in erotic projection onto an LGBT scholar’s own obsession: TV shows, Marvel heroes, Norse sagas. At the risk of betraying my own tastes, Sappol’s strongest argument comes with the illustrations of English surgeon and anatomist Joseph Maclise (1815–1880). Sappol stretches documentary innuendo to the extreme to find some hint that Maclise was homosexual. The best we have is that he was a difficult character and a lifelong bachelor. However, his illustrations do almost speak for themselves. He mostly drew men unless he needed to illustrate female anatomy. This is not probatory, because male cadavers (particularly of executed criminals) were most easily available. Additionally, longstanding sexism dictated that men were the prototype of human. (In Genesis, God makes Adam first and Eve as an afterthought.) Maclise devotes enormous attention to the men’s faces, even though there’s no pedagogical reason to show them at all. It is proof of Maclise’s skill as an artist and lends credence to the accuracy of his dissections. Yet, the beauty of these dead faces—one of which Sappol rightly compares to a crucified Christ—betrays Maclise’s queerness… or mine.
Whether readers are totally convinced about the homoeroticism of 18th- and 19th-century anatomical illustration and the sophisticated collectors trading in them, a range of LGBT readers may relish Queer Anatomies. Gay physicians and æsthetes of all stripes will enjoy Sappol’s chatty style, peppered with winking asides, and appreciate his deep scholarship and intimate familiarity with anatomical art.
Vernon Rosario, MD, associate clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, is the author of The Erotic Imagination: French Histories of Perversity.
