Front cover of 'Queer Anatomies: Aesthetics and Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1700-1900' by Michael Sappol
Queer Anatomies: The Odd Case of Mr. Joseph Maclise and his Figures
Join Michael Sappol, historian of the visual culture of medicine and science, for an evening talk on his new book 'Queer Anatomies', at the Royal College of Surgeons of England
20th February 2025
18:30–20:00
£10
Attendees are invited to visit the Hunterian Museum from 5-6:30pm before the talk starts
Sexual body-parts and same-sex desire were unmentionables, debarred from representation in 18th- and 19th-century print culture. Yet one scientific discipline — anatomy — had license to picture intimate details of the human body — rectum and genitalia included. Anatomical illustrations were often soberly technical. But could also be monstrous, flirtatious, theatrical, transgressive. And erotic. Anatomical publications gave off heat, pleasured the men who gazed upon and collected them in homosocial circles of comradely connoisseurship.
In art academies, schools of medicine, and the encyclopedic curriculum of Enlightenment discourse, anatomy was a foundational subject. Aesthetic discernment and medical and artistic competence all depended on a secure knowledge of anatomy and its texts — which offered unique opportunities for perverse erotic representation. In the 18th century that occurred mostly in the idiom of classicism or harsh Netherlandish realism, but in the 1840s and 50s, surgeon-illustrator Joseph Maclise, FRCS, remade the anatomical image into an intimate space of sensual experience and private pleasure. Maclise's lost archive of closeted queer expression — mostly overlooked in the scholarship — gets appreciative consideration in this illustrated talk and (along with works by many other anatomists) in the pages of Mike Sappol's latest book, Queer Anatomies.
Recommended for ages 16+
Michael Sappol
About Michael Sappol
Michael Sappol is a historian of the visual culture of medicine and science, and Visiting Researcher in the History of Science & Ideas at Uppsala University. His latest book is Queer Anatomies: Aesthetics & Desire in the Anatomical Image 1700- 1900 (Bloomsbury, 2024). He is also the author of A Traffic of Dead Bodies: Anatomy & Embodied Social Identity in 19th-Century America (2002) and Body Modern: Fritz Kahn, Scientific Illustration & the Homuncular Subject (2017). Current projects: “Anatomy’s photography: Objectivity, showmanship & the reinvention of the anatomical image”; “Endangered specimens, unaccountable objects: Historical medical collections and the competing ethical claims made upon them.” For downloadable selected works, go to https://uppsalauniversitet.academia.edu/MichaelSappol.
Superior Mesenteric Artery, by Joseph Maclise, from Richard Quain, The Anatomy of the Arteries of the Human Body
The Relations of the Principal Blood Vessels to the Viscera of the Thoracico-Abdominal Cavity by Joseph Maclise, from Joseph Maclise, Surgical Anatomy
The Relation of the Internal Parts to the External Surface of the Body, by Joseph Maclise, from Joseph Maclise, Surgical Anatomy
Illustrating the Action of the Thoracico-Abdominal Apparatus as Effecting the Motions of the Contained Viscera, by Joseph Maclise, from Joseph Maclise, Surgical Anatomy