Abstract Summary
It’s Paris, 18 April 1910. Eugène-Louis Doyen (1859-1916) takes the stage to deliver a lecture on topographical anatomy. Doyen intends to astonish the crowd with a carnivale moderne of medical science. There will be: lantern-slide projections of color photographs of machine-sliced cross-sections of “scientifically mummified” cadavers; silent films of surgeries; displays of actual cadaveric slices, via direct presentation and episcopic projection; even a bit of onstage dissection. As the program commences, Doyen’s supporters and detractors come to blows. The lecture becomes a notorious fiasco, reported on in the Parisian press and New York Times. It’s an episode full of juicy details that bear on the politics and practice of elite French medicine, the staging and meaning of scientific lectures and photographic presentation, the performance of scientific persona, and the media milieu of belle époque France. Yet historians have somehow overlooked the riot, Doyen’s photography, and the larger corpus of photographic anatomical image production from its 1860s origins through its development over many decades following. This paper focuses on the 279 photographic plates of Doyen’s amazing, disturbing Atlas d'anatomie topographique (1911-12)—the unheralded masterpiece previewed onstage that April evening in Paris. I want to consider the meanings, aesthetics, dramaturgy and boundaries of Doyen’s extremophile scientific and representational practice—anatomical photography as social, cultural, and professional performance. My questions: What difference did photography make to anatomy? And, if photographic construction of the universal anatomical human violated normative conventions of idealized anatomical representation, what difference did photography make to the representation of difference?
Self-Designated Keywords :
photography, anatomy, France, dissection, aesthetics, representation, medicine
