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Anatomy as Spectacle - Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (Hardcover, New)
Loot Price: R3,834
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Anatomy as Spectacle - Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present (Hardcover, New)
Series: Representations: Health, Disability, Culture and Society, 5
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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From the late eighteenth century to the present day, public
exhibitions featuring displays of human anatomy have proven popular
with a wide range of audiences, successfully marketed as
educational facilities for medical professionals as well as
improving entertainments for the general public. Partly a product
of the public sanitation and health reform movements that began in
the eighteenth century, partly a form of popular spectacle, early
public anatomical exhibitions drew on two apparently distinct
cultural developments: firstly, the professionalisation of medicine
from the mid 1700s and the increasingly central role of practical
anatomy within it; secondly, the rise of a culture of public
spectacles such as world fairs, public museums, circuses and side
shows, and the use of new visual technologies these spaces
pioneered. Such spectacles often drew on medical discourses as a
way of lending legitimacy to their displays of human bodies, while
their popularity also helped make the then-contentious practice of
anatomy publicly acceptable.
This book examines the cultural work performed by such exhibitions
and their role in (re)producing new ways of seeing and knowing the
body over the modern era. While public anatomical exhibitions might
seem to occupy a marginal position in the history of popular
culture and that of medicine, their distinctive intermixing of the
medical and the spectacular has made them an influential and
intensely productive cultural space, an important site of emergence
for new ideas about bodily health and care. This book traces the
influential role of such exhibitions in popularising a distinctly
modern idea of the body as something requiring constant work and
careful self-cultivation-an idea which continues to play a central
role in the contemporary fascination with practices and
possibilities of self-improvement. Through a series of
representative case studies-including eighteenth-century
exhibitions of anatomical Venuses, nineteenth-century anatomical
museums "for men only" that served as quack clinics for sexual
disorders, traditional and contemporary freak shows, and the recent
public display of real human remains in Body Worlds and other such
exhibitions-Anatomy as Spectacle traces how these exhibitions
taught their spectators to see their bodies as something requiring
constant self-monitoring and management, constructing an embodied
modern subject who is always responsible, productive, temperate,
and focused on self-improvement.
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