Customer Reviews

The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy

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Gross Anatomy has always sounded to the lay public as some kind of perjorative about what medical students due, what pornographers do, and what artists perch above the cadaver to represent. Actually nothing could be further from the truth. For centuries artists and scientists have been joined at the hip - witness Vesalius and his immaculate engravings of the musculature and skeltons of the dissected bodies obtained by grave robbers under the umbrella of education. In this superbly written and illustrated volume Deanna Petherbridge and Ludmilla Jordanova have gleaned some of the finest examples of the study and representation of the human body resulting from this still ongoing duplicity between anatomists/physicians and artists. The journey here is well documented from the earliest forms to the latest depictions of how intensive visual and manual dissection of the human body has contributed to some of the finest art in the world. Bravo to the authors for opening a door to the lay public to once and for all subsume the negative implications of the term Gross Anatomy. Superb book!

be amazed at the beauty and delicay in which different artists at different times try to express and show the wonders of the human body.

i was left in awe, looking over the pages again and again, captivated by the words along with the images. and maybe just a bit brighter in the world of science.