Collecting Anatomy and Making Knowledge about Disease at Great Windmill Street: Matthew Baillie’s Morbid Anatomy

Fundamental to the work of William Hunter and his assistants at the Great Windmill Street school in London was the collecting of anatomical preparations. Not only were these preparations vital to teaching at the school, their making provided visual and tactile information that was the basis for many of the anatomical discoveries associated with the school. Diseased body parts were collected as part of this anatomical work throughout Hunter’s lifetime, as they were seen to provide insights into regular anatomy. This changed when Hunter’s nephew, Matthew Baillie, took over the school (with William Cruikshank) and reconceptualised how the diseased parts there were understood as ‘morbid anatomy’, later publishing The Morbid Anatomy of some of the most important parts of the human body (1793), which was one of the most successful works of learned medicine published in the eighteenth century. In this paper I argue that Baillie’s practice of morbid anatomy was fundamentally in keeping with the anatomical practices of the Great Windmill Street school; the tactile and visual information provided by the cadaver was prioritised above all else, but now for the subject of disease. This challenged typical practice in the study of disease, which included post-mortem examination of cadavers as part of case histories. In removing the temporal aspect from the study of diseased cadavers, Baillie argued that diseased appearances could be generalised, not just singular, knowledge and therefore an anatomical subject in its own right.