The Theatre of Anatomy

Speaker: Dr Richard Barnett (Independent Scholar)

Between the French Revolution and WWI, Europe and America witnessed a golden age of medical image-making. The first generation of mass-market anatomical and pathological textbooks and atlases offered crisp, detailed colour illustrations of the human body in health and sickness, but they also embodied – literally – a revolution in ideas about life, disease and death. Drawing on the images collected in his award-winning book – a collaboration between the Wellcome Library and Thames & Hudson – Richard Barnett explores a corpus of art that is beautiful and morbid, singular and sublime.