The Book of the Human Body

An anthology of compelling and confronting illustrations, this two-volume edition takes us a journey through our greatest mystery: ourselves. Drawing on material from antiquity up until the start of the Information Age, The Book of the Human Body shows how physicians, publishers, artists, and engravers have sought to understand, decode, and portray the human form through the sweep of history.

This edition reproduces material from an array of significant and striking anatomical works, sourced from collections around the world and enhanced by new photography. Highlights of this selection include the groundbreaking anatomical atlas of Andreas Vesalius – the Fabrica of 1543 – and the 19th-century surgical manuals of Charles Bell and John Maclise. As they vividly reanimate their subjects, these images carry echoes of Xavier Bichat’s words: “Open up a few bodies… and you will dissipate at once the darkness that mere observation alone could never have dispelled.”

The illustrations presented here range from a silk manuscript dated to 168 B.C., discovered from the excavated Mawangdui tomb in southern China and showing 44 figures engaged in exercises of “self-cultivation”, to the unmistakable early 20th-century poster aesthetic of Fritz Kahn. In all of these examples, the illustrations stand out not only as objects of medical understanding, but as conspicuous works of art in their own right.

Featuring authoritative texts by the historians Richard Barnett and Vivienne Lo, this edition puts several medical and anatomical topics under the microscope; including birth and reproduction, the contours of the skin, and celestial (or “astro-medical”) depictions of the body. Each of the over 950 images reproduced in these volumes asks us to journey beneath the surface – as historians, medical observers, art lovers, or simply as embodied beings – and discover ourselves anew.