Anatomy As Spectacle Public Exhibitions of Body from Nineteenth Century to Present

A pleasure to read, this well-written book offers many thoughtful and provocative reflections on anatomy and exhibition and will appeal to a wide range of scholars concerned with disability, culture and medical history. -- Professor Maria Frawley, The George Washington University Scholars from diverse disciplines will be interested in the material that Elizabeth Stephens traverses: wax Venuses, popular and educative anatomy museums, sideshow exhibitions of freakish bodies, and so on. For several hundred years, in changing ways, human bodies-dead and alive, whole and in parts, actual and modeled-have been turned into anatomical objects for popular and educative display. Stephens, like others including Michael Sappol in A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth Century America (2002), is interested in the cultural work such exhibitions perform: how they seek to authorize particular ways of understanding the bodies displayed, and concomitantly of those who come to view them; how they produce subjectivities. The book's four chapters illuminate these themes. Stephens focuses in turn upon wax models of women's reproductive anatomy; the nineteenth-century panic about male sexual health (the "liquid body of the spermatorrhoeaic," p. 105); sideshows featuring professional freaks like Jo-Jo the Dog-Faced Boy and the Siamese Twins Chang and Eng; and the tradition of e'corche' figures, skinned to reveal their internal anatomy, which are historical precursors of Gunther von Hagens's Body Worlds exhibitions. A beguiling cast of characters, some familiar (the Hottentot Venus, the Irish Giant, P. T. Barnum, medico-showman Dr. Kahn) and some less so, appear throughout the book. Stephens illustrates how "popular medical discourses and public spectacles ... were united in their representations of the body and its health as a matter of personal responsibility and self-control" even though some bodies, suffering from maladies that were at the time incurable, were " 'beyond control' " and exhibited as freaks (pp. 104-105). She argues that the distinction between medicine and the spectacular has always been a slippery one, with the relationship between the two constantly being "actively and mutually reconfigured" (p. 97). Importantly, freaks came medically certified, an entanglement of two worlds that proved to be an ultimate disservice to freak shows as medicine changed the way "unusual anatomies" (p. 92) were regarded, moving them "off the public stage and into a private or clinical setting" (p. 109) where, Stephens's discussion of Jean-Martin Charcot's "hysterics" shows, medicine was also spectacularized in the Hopital Pitie-Salpetriere. Interestingly, Stephens discusses how anatomical exhibitions continue to be created for and to fascinate audiences. The hugely popular Body Worlds exhibits have now reversed the trend of such displays becoming, during the nineteenth century, increasingly less reputable, for von Hagens now displays in influential museums around the world rather than the grungy art galleries he once favored. Moreover, sideshows have re-emerged as a viable form of entertainment. Stephens argues that in 1982, Coney Island's Sideshows by the Seashore initiated a postmodern generation of freak shows, embedded in the culture of performing arts and with an eye to heritage. A bearded lady can now make a spectacle of herself at Coney Island. Stephens points to a rich archive of images, particularly regarding freak shows. More generally, she argues that historians have underutilized the "modes and means of medicine's visualisation" (p. 18). I think she is right, although there are notable exceptions, such as John Harley Warner and John Edmonson's Dissection: Photographs of a Rite of Passage in American Medicine, 1880-1930 (2009). Stephens is interested in the ways images and their accompanying texts (captions, museum labels, catalog notes) seek to authorize fixed identities for the pictured subjects. But this is something they cannot ultimately accomplish. Charles Eisenmann's photograph of the "Ohio Big-Foot Girl" (Fanny Mills), which Stephens reproduces in a chapter titled "From the Freak to the Disabled Person: Anatomical Difference as Public Spectacle and Private Condition," is a case in point. This image, which Stephens argues is exemplary of Eisenmann's fairground portraits, illustrates a neatly dressed women, skirt raised to reveal legs filled with lymph fluid, her eyes disconcertingly returning the viewer's gaze. The photograph, together with the label on its obverse side, attempts to fix the viewer's understanding of Fanny Mills on those legs and, as the image was taken for promotional purposes, to tempt viewers to visit the show and see the real thing. But such photographs have an afterlife. Archived, Fanny Mills also exists in the twenty-first century when the photograph invites a different reading, as does our understanding of the cultural work such images continue to perform. No longer Ohio Big-Foot Girl, Fanny Mills's portrait illustrates a shift from "freak" to "disability." Each reader will find within this book something that resonates with his or her own research interests. Stephens is right: images make a difference. Faces in particular draw our gaze, no matter how firmly a caption insists that we look elsewhere. Gender rather than race is Stephens's primary tool of analysis, but when I saw Fanny Mills I noticed her African descent. The photograph could have led Stephens to a contemplation of the many exhibitions of raced bodies that were made during this period. Scientists and others turned people into spectacles as they sought to categorize them into the racial history of humankind. These individuals were measured, mapped, and modeled in dioramas, and their skulls together with preserved heads were collected and displayed in both medical and popular exhibitions. Cultural historians who seek new contributions to this field that are grounded in fresh findings made in archival repositories may be disappointed with this book, whose value lies elsewhere. Stephens engages with the literature on "spectacular" anatomy from a cultural studies perspective and offers an excellent entry point to a large and burgeoning multidisciplinary literature on a subject that continues to intrigue both scholars and popular audiences. MacDonald -- MacDonald American Historical Review 201210 Scholars from diverse disciplines will be interested in the material that Elizabeth Stephens traverses: wax Venuses, popular and educative anatomy museums, sideshow exhibitions of freakish bodies. Stephens engages with the literature on "spectacular" anatomy from a cultural studies perspective and offers an excellent entry point to a large and burgeoning multidisciplinary literature on a subject that continues to intrigue both scholars and popular audiences. American Historical Review 201210 Anatomy as Spectacle makes an important contribution to the history of science by underscoring the crucial place of cultural history within the discipline. Stephens's use of visual and material sources demonstrates the ways in which a close reading of these types of "texts" challenges received narratives about the professionalization of science. ISIS, volume 103, number 2 201206 In Anatomy as Spectacle, Elizabeth Stephens traces the development, proliferation and changing significance of the anatomical exhibition (through museum cultures and the practices of certain anatomists and artists) from the early eighteenth century through to our contemporary moment. Her genealogy, while not exhaustive in its scope of analysis, calls attention to the complex, productive and peculiar intersections between popular anatomical exhibitions (such as the 'sexual health' museum, the 'freak show', displays of human waxwork figures) and the Western institutions of medicine. By extension, as a 'looping effect', Stephens argues that these intersections have helped transform the various discourses concerning human bodies that circulate in everyday social contexts. She fleshes out how medical and anatomical knowledge has been, and still is, appropriated outside the borders of the 'big' institutions (the 'spermattorhea' epidemic is a superb case in point). The book offers, in her words, a study of 'the role such exhibitions played in establishing anatomy as an increasingly respectable and important source of knowledge about bodies, and as sites in which audiences were explicitly trained to see and understand bodies in particular ways' (5). Thus, Stephens demonstrates how anatomy is not pure, truth-telling matter or a 'thing' whose meaning and value is ordained by 'scientific' objectivity, but in many ways a kind of spectacular technology, a thread of corporeal knowledge that is too difficult to disentangle from the multiple other threads - incorporations, if you will - that indeed go into building a body. Each chapter focuses on a specific exhibitory practice or site, and its broader social effects, in order to discuss the development of the modern, bourgeois notion of embodiment as a process of cultivation and maintenance of a self in good health. Anatomical exhibitions, Stephens suggests, have thus become a key component in the general project of understanding what bodies are and can do, and at once the dangers, diseases and variations to which they are potentially susceptible. These chapters - written mostly in a clear, pragmatic language that is often lacking in contemporary scholarly writing - raise questions concerning the gendering of anatomy (where the male body becomes the standard, hermetic subject), the discursive oscillation from 'freak' to 'disabled person' and the interpretative politics involved in seeing; that is, the contingency of the spectacle. One of the difficulties of this book, however, is that in providing quite a cornucopia of information Stephens seems to 'jump', usually subtly, from moment to moment, site to site, and this can have the effect of 'skimming' over some complicated terrain. This becomes particularly evident in her discussion of disabled embodiment and 'freak show' exhibitions, where the historical transformations - especially the individualising of impairment - tend to be glossed over. While this may be a tricky thing to avoid in any genealogy, as one must retain some humility of scope and style, the analytical weight of the arguments are left for the reader to determine on quite a few occasions. Moreover, Stephens is often at risk of over-citation insofar as the many and varied arguments and ideas she introduces into her book (especially from those supposedly always applicable scholars, Baudrillard and Foucault) are not necessarily given much traction through explanation. Again, this has the effect of 'skimming' or collapsing quite a few theoretical trajectories into one. In spite of this, Stephens has opened up a critical space - not entirely innovative but certainly anticipatory - to further research and discuss the connections between anatomical exhibitions, medical practice and body-discourses. While it is most interested in modalities of seeing, or how bodies are trained to look at anatomical exhibitions and interpret their objects, Anatomy as Spectacle, like most current scholarly literature, consolidates the primacy of vision at the expense of the other senses. If this is a book that is concerned with bodies that are not only knowledgeable but sensible I wager that, for instance, the inodorousness or non-tactility of the museum site (what does it mean for an audience to 'look but not touch'?) and how this 'ocularcentrism' structures and constrains our understandings of bodies, demanded some articulation. There is a hesitation to write against a world of semblances, signs, sights, spectacles, surfaces here, and perhaps for good reason. However, the confusion of bodies and technologies (in a word, somatechne) cannot simply be reduced to the ocular faculties - and this concrete relationship between seeing and thinking and doing - as there is more at stake. However, given the scope and inexorable constraints of the form, Stephens' Anatomy as Spectacle offers a fresh and engaging account of the budding, and indeed the wilting, of a historical nexus between exhibitory cultures and practices, medicine as a discipline that disciplines, and of course the maintenance, meaning and value of particular bodies in the everyday. It is well worth a read for scholars interested or doing research in fields such as disability studies, sensory studies, gender studies and indeed that spacious, noisy interval at which these are often drawn together: cultural studies. -- Kurt Bugden Somatechnics, Volume 2, Issue 201209 Stephens' Anatomy as Spectacle offers a fresh and engaging account of the budding, and indeed the wilting, of a historical nexus between exhibitory cultures and practices, medicine as a discipline that disciplines, and of course the maintenance, meaning and value of particular bodies in the everyday. It is well worth a read for scholars interested or doing research in fields such as disability studies, sensory studies, gender studies and indeed that spacious, noisy interval at which these are often drawn together: cultural studies. Somatechnics, Volume 2, Issue 2 201209 Elizabeth Stephens's latest book examines displays of the human body from the anatomical Venuses of the eighteenth century, through popular anatomical museums and the "spermatorrhoea epidemic," to Victorian freak shows, and, finally, to Gunther von Hagens's Body Worlds. She argues that these types of exhibitions produced specific ways of seeing the body and thus understanding one's relationship to it. In particular she stresses that over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries there emerged adiscourse around the cultivation of the self that was predicated on a widespread understanding of the le body as "docile." Crucially, she demonstrates that science and spectacle were interrelated ways of producing this bodily knowledge. Stephens thus focuses on public displays in order to reveal the dynarnic relationship between popular and professional cultures of the body. The book is successful on several fronts. It makes an excellent case for the importance of cultural history to the history of science by demonstrating that spectacularization was (and is) Intrinsic to the production of medical knowledge. The chapter on the anatomical Venuses is particularly strong in this respect, outlining the ways which wax models moved from the public sphere to the nascent professional sphere and back again. Here Stephens argues not only that the boundaries between medical knowledge and popular knowledge have always been porous, but that the division between science and entertainment was a negotiated settlement that was by no means complete by the end of the nineteenth century. The chapter on the "spermatorrhoea epidemic" furthers Stephens's major point by revealing that discourses and exhibitionary techniques of lowbrow anatomical museums were shared by an emerging medical profession. Both trained doctors and the quack proprietors of popular medical museums were similarly concerned to diagnose and treat the physical effects of seminal loss associated with masturbation, venereal disease, and other forms of sexual incontinence. This chapter deepens the gendered analysis that frames Stephens's account of the wax Venuses to focus on the ways in which concerns over seminal loss constructed the male body as fluid, porous, leaky, and undisciplined, discourses more often associated with female embodiment. Stephens's analysis of Body Worlds also extends this focus on the porousness of the body, even in the modern period, by arguing for the ways in which von Hagens's "event anatomy" invents a notion of bodily interiority that becomes central to ideas about the management of the modern self. Although the chapter on freaks makes a strong argument for the ways in which medical and spectacular ways of seeing the body emerged at the same moment and in relationship to each other, it feels out of place prey because it moves beyond the specificity of anatomy that anchors the rest of the monograph. Given how short the book is, the presence of this chapter raises the question of why there is not another that deals explicitly with ethnographic exhibitions. Both Joseph Kahn's and J. W. Reimers's anatomical museums featured waxworks of ethnographic "specimens." This connection between anatomy and anthropology (and in some cases freakery as well) was crucial to how Victorians constructed themselves in relation to the bodies of Others. A chapter on ethnographic displays would have cemented this argument more effectively and supported the inclusion of freaks in this study. My other concern regarding the coherence of this study was that the book moved too quickly from the nineteenth century to the twenty-first. It could have lingered on the Transparent Man exhibit of 1930, or even press photos of Holocaust victims, as other twentieth-century sites of corporeal exhibition where popular and professional understandings of the body collided. The narratives of both change and continuity over time were compromised by the lack of a twentieth-century case study. Anatomy as Spectacle makes an important contribution to the history of science by underscoring the crucial place of cultural history within the discipline. Stephens's use of visual and material sources demonstrates the ways in which a close reading of these types of "texts" challenges received narratives about the professionalization of science. I think that the book's shortcomings are due not to a lack of intellectual engagement but, rather, to the current crisis in academic publishing that has favored shorter monographs at the expense of more sustained and in-depth studies. -- Nadia Durbach ISIS, Volume 103, Number 2 201206 Anatomy as Spectacle makes an important contribution to the history of science by underscoring the crucial place of cultural history within the discipline. ISIS, Volume 103, Number 2 201206