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Man-Midwifery Under Assault (Again)

Welcome back to the Dittrick Museum Blog! In 2010, we featured a post about a contentious debate concerning 18th-century anatomist William Hunter: Man-midwifery got enough bad press in its day, in 18th century London. Smellie, Hunter, and their confreres have been amply vilified, justly or unjustly, for medicalizing the birth chamber. These chaps have since been heroes of the OB world on one side, and paragons of misogyny on the other. Without wishing to take sides, I couldn’t help but be amused by the latest assault on man-midwifery in the British press, particularly the online versions of The Guardian and...

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Anatomy Artists: William Smellie, William Hunter, and the work of Jan van Rymsdyk

As noted by Ludmilla Jordanova and Deanna Petherbridge in The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy, artists like Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci made enormous contributions to the emerging sciences of the body. The study of anatomy was, in fact, obligatory for many schools of art--and artists like Allessandro Allori composed anatomy textbooks for physicians.The close approximation of art and anatomy meant that the artists needed both “perceptual drawing skills” and “a strong stomach,” but just as the artist might be sometimes an anatomist, the anatomist or physician might sometimes be an artist. In this post, we will...

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