"Arts, Faculty of"@en . "History, Department of"@en . "DSpace"@en . "UBCV"@en . "McInnis, Meredith"@en . "2008-06-20T13:28:16Z"@en . "2008"@en . "Master of Arts - MA"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "In the mid-nineteenth century, anatomical illustration in England underwent a crisis of representation. Moral authorities were growing increasingly concerned with the proliferation of images of the naked body and the effects they might have on public \u00E2\u0080\u009Cdecency.\u00E2\u0080\u009D The anatomical profession was sensitive to this hostile climate to nude representations. In the years immediately preceding the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 that defined the category of \u00E2\u0080\u009Cpornography,\u00E2\u0080\u009D anatomical illustration was being purged of sexual connotations as part of an attempt to consolidate medicine as a respectable \u00E2\u0080\u009Cprofession.\u00E2\u0080\u009D In the eyes of this new professional body, there was no space for sexual associations in anatomical texts. \n\nArtistic medical anatomy\u00E2\u0080\u0099s rejection was driven by its links to problematic erotic traditions. Specifically, anatomy\u00E2\u0080\u0099s proximity to pseudo-medical pornography, the same-sex eroticism of the Hellenic tradition, and the problem of the male and female nude in \u00E2\u0080\u009Chigh art\u00E2\u0080\u009D were at issue. In representing the naked body artistically, anatomists brought their illustrations into dangerous proximity with these traditions. By systematically putting the work of one Victorian anatomist, Joseph Maclise, into dialogue with these erotic traditions, it becomes clear that medicine was not isolated from the broader sexual culture. This study demonstrates that viewing publics and viewing practices are historically specific and are brought into being by the interaction of visual phenomena by emphasizing the fluidity between representational fields of art, medicine and sexuality. The effort to excise the sexual meanings contained in anatomy ultimately led to the emergence of a new diagrammatic style of anatomical drawing that became the orthodox style of medical illustration, and that persists to this day."@en . "https://circle.library.ubc.ca/rest/handle/2429/930?expand=metadata"@en . "1019653 bytes"@en . "application/pdf"@en . " DISSECTING THE EROTIC: ART AND SEXUALITY IN MID-VICTORIAN MEDICAL ANATOMY by MEREDITH MCINNIS B.A., The University of British Columbia, 2006 A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ARTS in THE FACULTY OF GRADUATE STUDIES (History) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Vancouver) June 2008 \u00C2\u00A9 Meredith McInnis, 2008 ii ABSTRACT In the mid-nineteenth century, anatomical illustration in England underwent a crisis of representation. Moral authorities were growing increasingly concerned with the proliferation of images of the naked body and the effects they might have on public \u00C2\u0093decency.\u00C2\u0094 The anatomical profession was sensitive to this hostile climate to nude representations. In the years immediately preceding the Obscene Publications Act of 1857 that defined the category of \u00C2\u0093pornography,\u00C2\u0094 anatomical illustration was being purged of sexual connotations as part of an attempt to consolidate medicine as a respectable \u00C2\u0093profession.\u00C2\u0094 In the eyes of this new professional body, there was no space for sexual associations in anatomical texts. Artistic medical anatomy\u00C2\u0092s rejection was driven by its links to problematic erotic traditions. Specifically, anatomy\u00C2\u0092s proximity to pseudo-medical pornography, the same- sex eroticism of the Hellenic tradition, and the problem of the male and female nude in \u00C2\u0093high art\u00C2\u0094 were at issue. In representing the naked body artistically, anatomists brought their illustrations into dangerous proximity with these traditions. By systematically putting the work of one Victorian anatomist, Joseph Maclise, into dialogue with these erotic traditions, it becomes clear that medicine was not isolated from the broader sexual culture. This study demonstrates that viewing publics and viewing practices are historically specific and are brought into being by the interaction of visual phenomena by emphasizing the fluidity between representational fields of art, medicine and sexuality. The effort to excise the sexual meanings contained in anatomy ultimately led to the emergence of a new diagrammatic style of anatomical drawing that became the orthodox style of medical illustration, and that persists to this day. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085....ii Table of Contents\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085iii List of Figures\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085.iv Acknowledgments..\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085vi \u00C2\u0093Dissecting the Erotic: Art and Sexuality in Mid-Victorian Medical Anatomy\u00C2\u0094\u00C2\u0085.\u00C2\u0085..\u00C2\u0085.1 Bibliography.\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085.57 iv LIST OF FIGURES 1. The External Oblique Muscle. Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical (\u00C2\u0093Gray\u00C2\u0092s Anatomy\u00C2\u0094)\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085...\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085.14 2. Plate 10: The surgical dissection of the sterno-clavicular or tracheal region, and the relative position of its main bloodvessels, nerves, &c. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085..15 3. Plate 65-66: The surgical dissection of the popliteal space and the posterior crural region. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u008515 4. Plate 64, fig. 6: Deformities of the urinary bladder-the operations of sounding for stone, of catheterism and of puncturing the bladder above the pubes. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085...\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085..16 5. Plate X: External Views of the Male and Female Organs of Generation. Kalogynomia\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085 21 6. Plate XVI: Suction and Collapse of the Vagina. Generative System of John Roberton\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085... 23 7. Plate 8: The surgical dissection of the subclavian and carotid regions, and the relative anatomy of their contents. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085..25 8. Plate 18: The surgical dissection of the wrist and hand. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085... 25 9. Plate 7: The surgical dissection of the subclavian and carotid regions, the relative anatomy of their contents. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085..27 10. Plate 26: The relation of the internal parts to the external surface. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085...28 11. Plate 11: The surgical dissection of the axillary and brachial regions, displaying the relative order of their contained parts. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085... 29 12. Plate 49: The relative anatomy of the male pelvic organs. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085.30 13. Plate 48: The relative anatomy of the male pelvic organs. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085... 30 14. Plates 66: Surgical dissection of the popliteal space, and the posterior crural region. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085.32 15. Plate 50: The surgical dissection of the superficial structures of the male perin\u00C3\u00A6um. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085. 33 v 16. Plate 13: The surgical form of the male and female axill\u00C3\u00A6 compared. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085 44 17. The Wrestlers. William Etty, ca. 1840\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085. 49 18. Guardsman Higgins. William Etty\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085...\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085.... 50 19. Male nude. Eug\u00C3\u00A8n\u00C3\u00A8 Durieu, 1853. \u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085...\u00C2\u0085 52 20. Plate 23: The relative position of the deeper organs of the thorax and those of the abdomen. Surgical Anatomy \u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085...\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u008552 21. Plate 51: The surgical dissection of the superficial structures of the male perin\u00C3\u00A6um. Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085\u00C2\u0085...53 vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to express my gratitude to Joy Dixon for her support and her enthusiasm for this project. I would also like to thank Bill French and Maureen Ryan whose insights were instrumental. Thanks as well to Lee Perry at the Woodward Memorial Room and Christine Ruggere at the Johns Hopkins Institute for the History of Medicine. Thank you to the staff, faculty and graduate students in the Department of History at the University of British Columbia. I would also like to thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council for funding this project. My family has provided unwavering support, and I am appreciative to Frances for pushing my intellectual agenda. Finally, thanks to Andrew. 1 Dissecting the Erotic: Art and Sexuality in Mid-Victorian Medical Anatomy In medical anatomy, the interior and exterior of the body are in dialogue. Muscles, veins and arteries, bones and organs that are veiled by the skin are exposed for viewing by the medical gaze. For the mid-nineteenth century surgeon and anatomist, Joseph Maclise (c.1815-1880), the exterior of the body was as pertinent to medical study as the interior. According to Maclise, the \u00C2\u0093unbroken surface of the human figure is as a map to the surgeon, explanatory of the anatomy arranged beneath.\u00C2\u0094 As he argued in his 1851 anatomy volume Surgical Anatomy, it is impossible to understand the internal body without looking at its external \u00C2\u0093superficies.\u00C2\u00941 At this moment in medicine when anatomical drawing was turning towards the diagrammatic and schematic, Maclise\u00C2\u0092s valuation of the artistic exterior was an interesting\u00C2\u0097and puzzling\u00C2\u0097representational choice. In choosing to represent these \u00C2\u0093superficies\u00C2\u0094\u00C2\u0097the exterior of unclothed male bodies including their faces and skin\u00C2\u0097Maclise elected to work within a representational field that was full of potential problems. Erotic traditions were associated with all of the representational modes and scripts that were available for drawing the unclothed male body; the erotic legacies of pornographic pseudo-medical texts, Hellenism and the neoclassical aesthetic, and high art nudes made Maclise\u00C2\u0092s illustrations ambiguous. The images are both erotic and non-erotic and they blur the boundaries between these categories, suggesting a representational fluidity. Representations of anatomical bodies are unstable; they are ostensibly licit, but simultaneously tremble on the edge of the illicit and erotic by virtue of their proximity to these other representational traditions. Thus, in order to protect his professional 1 Joseph Maclise, Surgical Anatomy (Philadelphia: Blanchard and Lea, 1851), viii. 2 reputation at this moment when medical practitioners were closing ranks as a professional body, Maclise needed to carefully navigate his way through this web of connections. The problem that Maclise faced\u00C2\u0097the impossibility of completely eliminating erotic interpretations because of the ubiquity of these erotic meanings in representational traditions of the human body\u00C2\u0097was created by two broader currents. Firstly, it was an issue of what had been seen and continued to linger in the public\u00C2\u0092s visual consciousness. The publication of several quasi-medical works that deliberately elided the distinction between the medical and the pornographic in the 1820s, The Kalogynomia (1821) and The Generative System of John Roberton (1824 edition), made both doctors and legislators sensitive to the potential overlap between medical texts and pornography. The idea that medicine could be used for erotic stimulation and gratification was highly problematic to these authorities. Secondly, it was an issue of who was doing the looking. The Generative System of John Roberton became controversial only after it was found in the possession of lower class prisoners which suggests the relevance of concerns over class-based viewing practices to the emerging legal definition of obscenity.2 Maclise\u00C2\u0092s images were not confined to the medical community but seemed to be part of a broader marketplace and the profession received this with unease. By marketing to an elite audience through expensive volumes, use of Latin, and restricting sales to medical students and practitioners, the orthodox medical profession resisted the popularization of anatomy and expressed its anxieties about image circulation. By systematically placing Maclise\u00C2\u0092s images in dialogue with other images from the representational traditions noted above, it is possible to see how in addition to their 2 Roberta McGrath, Seeing Her Sex: Medical Archives and the Female Body (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 58. 3 \u00C2\u0093medical meanings\u00C2\u0094 anatomical texts accumulated sexual meanings. It is not my intention to suggest that Maclise\u00C2\u0092s images were patently erotic, or used as pornography; rather, I seek to demonstrate that the multitude of simultaneous and overlapping associations between art, sexuality, and medicine narrowly circumscribed what was deemed \u00C2\u0093appropriate\u00C2\u0094 illustration. Furthermore, the increasing restrictiveness of this definition eventually made drawing in an artistic style difficult, if not impossible, for anatomists. Using Maclise\u00C2\u0092s Surgical Anatomy as a case study demonstrates the persistence of these representational connections. Anatomical texts were not insulated from popular and sexual culture; they actively negotiated these fields and were thus crucially informed by the debates and controversies taking place well outside the profession\u00C2\u0092s definition of the medical sphere. The line separating the medical and the pornographic had become blurred, and Hellenism held appeal as a way to shore up the respectability of the medical artistic tradition. However, Hellenism also raised problems because of its own erotic heritage and its links to the larger crisis of the nude in \u00C2\u0093high art.\u00C2\u0094 Since the sexual connotations in artistic genres were persistent and problematically fluid, they partially motivated the movement towards diagrammatic anatomical illustration that was gradually being undertaken in the first half of the nineteenth century. By the late 1850s and early 1860s, a series of representational crises had rendered this process almost complete and artistic anatomy was discarded in favour of the diagrammatic style that erased the spectre of eroticism from medicine. Examining the eroticism of Maclise\u00C2\u0092s illustrations helps to show how defining something as \u00C2\u0093erotic\u00C2\u0094 relied on a historically specific visual register. This notion, that different historical viewing publics defined eroticism differently and that definitions 4 could shift radically according to new stimuli, has thus far been underdeveloped in scholarship. In recent years, homoeroticism has begun to become the object of academic scrutiny\u00C2\u0097relevant here where male doctors examine and draw male patients/cadavers\u00C2\u0097 but heteroeroticism has been less rigorously examined. Emphasizing the ways in which these categories existed simultaneously is most helpful, rather than drawing an artificial distinction between homosexual and heterosexual eroticism. In the late nineteenth century, sexology classified homosexuality or \u00C2\u0091inversion\u00C2\u0094 as a pathology; in this earlier period, male-male relationships of all varieties, as Eve Sedgwick has suggested, can be envisioned as existing along a continuum.3 Homophobia, however, ruptured this continuum and constructed \u00C2\u0093the heterosexual\u00C2\u0094 and \u00C2\u0093the homosexual\u00C2\u0094 as opposites, thus polarizing sexual and non-sexual relationships.4 Placing Maclise\u00C2\u0092s illustrations in the continuum preceding this rupture enables us to think of the ways that male-female eroticism and male-male eroticism are bound up together; for example, the male body in Maclise\u00C2\u0092s illustrations functions simultaneously as both a same-sex aesthetic ideal and a procreative model. His illustrations enable us to interrogate a moment when sexual identities were not fixed or oppositional, but were conceived as, however problematically, mobile. Recognizing both the \"erotic\u00C2\u0094 and the \u00C2\u0093pornographic\u00C2\u0094 as historically specific and seeing eroticism as not only an intellectual/emotional impulse but also an embodied 3 John Tosh observes that Sedgwick\u00C2\u0092s conception of homosociality still \u00C2\u0093operates within clear limits, for in the interests of protecting the key patriarchal institution of marriage, desire between males in inadmissible; camaraderie must remain just that.\u00C2\u0094 \u00C2\u0093What Should Historians Do with Masculinity? Reflections on Nineteenth-century Britain,\u00C2\u0094 History Workshop Journal 38 (1994): 187. Matt Cook challenges this idea by arguing that in certain homosocial atmospheres, like elite clubs, homosexual men were widely tolerated and accepted. London and the Culture of Homosexuality (Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 4 Jonathan Rutherford, Forever England: Reflections on Race, Masculinity and Empire (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1997), 27; Allen Ellenzweig, The Homoerotic Photograph: Male Images from Durieu/Delacroix to Mapplethorpe (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), 2. 5 experience is equally crucial. Some philosophers, such as Susan Bordo, have suggested that the erotic\u00C2\u0097placed in opposition to the sexual\u00C2\u0097is an emotional impulse, an \u00C2\u0093urge for attachment, for connectedness,\u00C2\u0094 in which physical desire is absent.5 This seems to dehistoricize the erotic as a psychological \u00C2\u0093nature,\u00C2\u0094 instead of characterizing it as an historically specific way of feeling and thinking. Sharon Marcus, in contrast, has argued that the embodiment of physical excitement and intimacy coupled with the feelings specific to nineteenth-century middle-class femininities (of \u00C2\u0093companionship, love, caretaking, admiration, longing [and] obsession\u00C2\u0094) characterized the female homoeroticism expressed in Victorian fashion plates.6 An analytic position that is sensitive to the embodied experience of eroticism will call attention to the unspoken distinctions that shape the way we think about sexual categories. For example, the distinction is often made between erotic material (that titillates our minds and imaginations) and pornography (that arouses the body). The assumed rigidity of these categories obscures the fact that they were historical developments and that bodies and desire are historically specific. In the nineteenth century, the consolidation of categories such as \u00C2\u0093pornography\u00C2\u0094 through obscenity legislation was debated and contested precisely because of the absence of self-evident criteria for defining such categories. The concern that paintings of nude Venuses held in private collections might be confiscated under obscenity legislation demonstrates the fact that \u00C2\u0093art\u00C2\u0094 and \u00C2\u0093pornography\u00C2\u0094 are not stable or separate categories. Thus, reminding ourselves of the multitude of cultural meanings that are simultaneously expressed by visual sources is vital to this project. 5 Susan Bordo, \u00C2\u0093Reading the Male Body\u00C2\u0094 in Building Bodies, ed. Pamela L Moore (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1997), 66. 6 Sharon Marcus, \u00C2\u0093Reflections on Victorian Fashion Plates\u00C2\u0094 differences 14, no. 3 (2003): 6. 6 We can trace a similar multiplicity of meanings in other cultural movements, such as Hellenism, which cannot be linked in any straightforward way to the history of Victorian sexuality. The scholarship on the many manifestations of the classical inheritance in nineteenth-century England demonstrates this point admirably. Hellenism held potent visual and cultural meanings to Victorians. Historians of English homosexuality have observed that Hellenism provided a crucial way for homosexual men to understand their own identities and a vocabulary with which to argue for the acceptance of these emergent identities; some homosexual Victorian men saw ancient Greece as a model for contemporary England, since they believed that the ancient Greeks upheld male-male love and sexual relationships as an integral part of their social fabric.7 Conversely, Sean Brady has argued that the Victorian obsession with Greek culture that began in the 1860s was largely devoid of reference to sexuality between men and emphasizes instead that it was primarily a discourse on national fitness and the spiritual and physical reinvigoration of a nation enervated by industrialization and urbanization.8 Both of these discursive strands were actually at work\u00C2\u0097and worked at cross purposes\u00C2\u0097 in Maclise\u00C2\u0092s volume, which demonstrates how both were relevant in the ways that male bodies were seen and imagined. Although Brady is quite right that there was minimal public discussion of Hellenism as justification for homosexuality in the 1860s, attending to the ways in which medical sources alluded to notions of homoeroticism has been an under-explored aspect of the relationship between Hellenism and sexuality in this period. 7 Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 124; For further discussion, see Linda Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). 8 Sean Brady, Masculinity and Male Homosexuality in Britain, 1861-1913 (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005), 178; See also, Bruce Haley, The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1978); George Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality: Respectability and Abnormal Sexuality in Modern Europe (New York: Howard Fertig, 1985); Michael Anton Budd, The Sculpture Machine: Physical Culture and Body Politics in the Age of Empire (London: MacMillan, 1997). 7 Significantly, examination of Hellenism\u00C2\u0092s influence on medical illustration has been scant in scholarship and has failed to make connections to larger debates about Hellenism and sexuality.9 Since art scholarship has been attentive to the ways that art often carries sexual subtexts, it is useful to think about the ways that Maclise\u00C2\u0092s anatomical illustrations are also highly artistic; they provided medical meanings while suggesting sexual ones as well. As Tamar Garb has argued, despite contemporary claims that the conventions of high art transmitted from classical antiquity through to the nineteenth century \u00C2\u0093transformed the naked into the nude and thereby occluded its sexual connotations,\u00C2\u0094 these exhortations to transcend the materiality of the naked body were largely prescriptive rather than reflecting the experiences of artists.10 Other scholars have argued that artists\u00C2\u0092 representations of the male figure were also powerful erotic objects. Alex Potts\u00C2\u0092s study of the influential eighteenth-century art critic Johann Winckelmann foregrounds Winckelmann\u00C2\u0092s articulation of the homoeroticism of the male nude.11 Similarly, Kenneth Mackinnon argues that there has been a tendency to ignore the erotics of male imagery in art, citing studies of the male form that couch their analysis in the rhetoric of masculinity\u00C2\u0097the male form as \u00C2\u0093magnificent,\u00C2\u0094 \u00C2\u0093heroic,\u00C2\u0094 and so on. Instead, he advocates a methodology of reading against the grain when looking at high art in an effort to 9 A notable exception is Ludmilla Jordanova who observes the \u00C2\u0093increased classicisation\u00C2\u0094 of anatomy in this period. Nature Displayed: Gender, Science and Medicine, 1760-1820 (London and New York: Longman, 1999), 192. 10 Tamar Garb \u00C2\u0093The Forbidden Gaze: Women Artists and the Male Nude in Late Nineteenth- century France\u00C2\u0094 in The Body Imaged: The Human Form and Visual Culture Since the Renaissance, ed. Kathleen Adler and Marcia Pointon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 40. 11 Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1994), 5. 8 \u00C2\u0093suggest a persistent eroticisation of power through the use of the male nude.\u00C2\u009412 Examining how these erotic impulses were worked out in medical art, not simply \u00C2\u0093high art,\u00C2\u0094 at this moment when \u00C2\u0093the sexual and medical gaze had yet to be separated\u00C2\u0094 demonstrates the ways in which art, medicine and sexuality worked in close dialogue with one another.13 A significant group of feminist scholars have taken anatomy and gender as their focus, skilfully treating the topic by emphasizing the voyeurism of the male medical gaze and the violation it effects when focussed on women\u00C2\u0092s bodies.14 These analyses, however, ignore the fact that male medical authorities were also interested in men\u00C2\u0092s bodies. Certainly Maclise\u00C2\u0092s illustrations are preoccupied with men and the pathologies unique to male body parts\u00C2\u0097only one of the sixty-eight plates in Surgical Anatomy is of a woman\u00C2\u0092s body. This evidence of an overwhelming interest by male doctors in male bodies requires attention and suggests that studies of heterosexual viewing practices must be supplemented by an examination of the homosexual visual economy in medicine. Maclise\u00C2\u0092s illustrations have important implications for scholarship on masculinity since they exemplify what he felt was a normative, masculine body. Both John Tosh and Roy Porter have identified an overvaluation of the mental and intellectual and a devaluation of the bodily in scholarship on masculinity.15 Looking at medical texts\u00C2\u0097that are nothing if not preoccupied with the body\u00C2\u0097addresses this silence. Maclise\u00C2\u0092s volume 12 Kenneth Mackinnon, Uneasy Pleasures: The Male as Erotic Object (London: Cygnus Arts, 1998), 44. 13 McGrath, Seeing Her Sex, 3. 14 Deanna Petherbridge and Ludmilla Jordanova, The Quick and the Dead: Artists and Anatomy (London: Hayward Gallery, 1998), 104; Ludmilla Jordanova, Sexual Visions: Images of Gender in Science and Medicine between the Eighteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989), 87. 15 John Tosh, \u00C2\u0093What should Historians Do with Masculinity?\u00C2\u0094 182; Roy Porter \u00C2\u0093History of the Body Reconsidered\u00C2\u0094 in New Perspectives on Historical Writing, ed. Peter Burke (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001), 235. 9 is an ideal site on which to bring these disparate bodies of literature into dialogue. Through his work it is possible to see how the dichotomies between mind and body, personal and national, erotic and non-erotic, and prescription and lived experience are unstable. Examining his work also leads us to recognize the importance of fluidity in thinking about sexual subjectivities. Joseph Maclise was an anatomist-surgeon who appears to have lived a relatively uneventful life in London. The Irish-born, University College London-trained Maclise goes unmentioned among the anatomical \u00C2\u0093greats\u00C2\u0094 and has been accorded little notice by historians. He was, however, popular in his own day. After receiving accolades from his professor and mentor, Richard Quain, whose volume Anatomy of the Arteries (1844) Maclise illustrated, he undertook his own anatomical project, conducting dissections and drawing illustrations that would be published in Surgical Anatomy in 1851; the volume of 68 lithographic plates and accompanying descriptions sold 1000 copies in its first six months in publication and was sufficiently popular to warrant numerous subsequent English and American editions.16 This proliferation of editions suggests a popularity that cannot be easily explained by an innovative contribution to the field of anatomy. Quite the opposite, in fact; human anatomy, according to Maclise, was outmoded. He remarks that \u00C2\u0093one may proclaim anthropotomy [human anatomy] to have worn itself out\u00C2\u0094 and proclaims its irrelevance. He describes it as \u00C2\u0093out-trodden,\u00C2\u0094 a \u00C2\u0093reiterate[ed] theme,\u00C2\u0094 and argues that \u00C2\u0093the narrow circle is footworn. All the needful facts are long since gathered, 16 Surgical Anatomy was published no less than twice in England (1851 and 1856) and three times in the United States (1851, 1857 and 1859) with other abridged editions of the plates and discussions available. For example, see R.U. Piper, ed. The Plates of Maclise\u00C2\u0092s Surgical Anatomy (Boston: John P. Jewett and Company, 1857). 10 sown, and known.\u00C2\u009417 Instead, Maclise imagined his contribution in terms of the importance of looking at \u00C2\u0093the retrospective,\u00C2\u0094 and stated the necessity of making generalizations that \u00C2\u0093re-examine the things and phenomena which, as novices, we passed by too lightly.\u00C2\u009418 Maclise\u00C2\u0092s retrospective orientation suggests that he saw the merit in artistic anatomy, but that he also recognized that it could progress no further as a clinical art. His interest was in the way it could be represented. Evidently, the public was appreciative of his effort; regardless of its lack of innovation, the volume was popular. Its popularity can be traced to the interests of medical anatomy\u00C2\u0092s two divergent audiences. Firstly, it was being rapidly consumed by \u00C2\u0093the student of medicine and the practitioner removed from the schools\u00C2\u0094 that Maclise states is his intended audience.19 These volumes were intended for medical instruction, but also had other, more ceremonial purposes. For example, in April 1852, in the town of Birtley near Newcastle, a Mr. George Gibson was presented with an inscribed copy of Maclise\u00C2\u0092s Surgical Anatomy, \u00C2\u0093handsomely bound in morocco and gilt,\u00C2\u0094 and an inscribed silver lancet case to commemorate his skill and his service to his patients.20 The ritualized ceremony\u00C2\u0097with speeches and lavish commemorative gifts (as the mention of silver and gold indicate)\u00C2\u0097 suggests that anatomical volumes were invested with cultural capital; they were \u00C2\u0093tokens,\u00C2\u0094 appropriate symbols of gratitude for a doctor and carried meanings (such as appreciation and respect) beyond their instructional purpose. Conversely, there was another trade in less lavish publications of anatomical illustrations. The relative inexpense of certain formats\u00C2\u0097for example, individual folio of Surgical Anatomy\u00C2\u0092s plates were available for 17 Maclise, Surgical Anatomy, vii. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., v. 20 Newcastle Courant, April 23, 1852, 8. 11 sale for five shillings each, in contrast to the fancy, leather-bound edition presented to Mr. Gibson\u00C2\u0097attest to their potential consumption by other, \u00C2\u0093non-medical eyes\u00C2\u0094 as well. This trend was encouraged by the fact that lithographic technology was easing production and spreading distribution at this time. Pioneered for anatomical applications in 1821 in France by Charles Philibert de Lasteyrie, lithography improved the process of reproduction; in lithography, a flat surface is drawn on with water-resistant chemicals which can then be more easily reproduced than the former process in which metal plates were painstakingly engraved.21 The technology was rapidly exported to other European countries and made large, complicated anatomical atlases, which often had plates measuring more than thirty centimetres by thirty centimetres, much faster to reproduce. By the 1850s, lithography was the norm in anatomical illustration and Maclise used it to produce Surgical Anatomy. This new technology created a problem of circulation and consumption. Commentators have observed that the restricted access to these anatomical volumes was not simply due to expense, but also because of content, arguing that as powerful a cultural authority as medicine may have been, it was not primarily of the \u00C2\u0093public domain.\u00C2\u009422 The same images that might be (relatively) unproblematically consumed by classically trained physicians whose visual registers were primed in certain ways by their education and social position, might prompt concern when viewed by the \u00C2\u0093wrong\u00C2\u0094 kind of audience (working class men and women, for example). Thus, cheaper editions circulating in increased numbers caused anxiety. Since it was impossible to guarantee that these images would not be consumed by an \u00C2\u0093undesirable\u00C2\u0094 popular 21 K.B. Roberts, Maps of the Body: Anatomical Illustration Through Five Centuries (St. John\u00C2\u0092s, NL: Memorial University of Newfoundland, 1981), 103. 22 W.F. Bynum, Science and the Practice of Medicine in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 12. 12 audience, the medical profession adopted new standards of illustration that would prevent transgressive mis-readings. The resulting processes of stylistic change in anatomical illustration can thus be seen as an attempt to dissociate anatomy from some of the loaded moral, political and sexual meanings that it had accrued. The problem with artistic illustration\u00C2\u0097namely that every available representational register was fraught with potentially transgressive sexual associations\u00C2\u0097was eventually its undoing. For many, the baggage of the artistic style was a burden, particularly at a moment when the process of professionalization heightened scrutiny of practitioners\u00C2\u0092 credibility and respectability. It seems that the diagrammatic style of representation that was gaining ground through the 1840s, and would reach its most popular (and long-lasting) incarnation in 1858\u00C2\u0092s Gray\u00C2\u0092s Anatomy, was a way out of this problem.23 The abstract or diagrammatic style, what Michael Sappol terms \u00C2\u0093the universal,\u00C2\u0094 seems not to be in dialogue with representational traditions that had been eroticised. Thus, it is possible to position Maclise at the very end of a long tradition of artistic illustration, as an artist who was continuing to draw on the heritage of artistic anatomy in England and on the Continent. He cited the work of Scarpa, Cowper, Haller, Hunter, Soemmering, Cruveilhier, and others as influences and thought retrospectively and self-consciously about situating his work in this earlier lineage. Maclise was aware of the stylistic precedents in anatomy and his representational style was not accidental; he made deliberate artistic choices based on the history of anatomy. Early anxieties about the artistry of anatomical illustration manifested themselves in the discussion around photography\u00C2\u0092s usefulness in anatomy. Photography was lauded 23 It is possible to trace this trend in works such as Jones Quain, Elements of Descriptive and Practical Anatomy (London: W. Simpkin & R. Marshall, 1828). 13 as a new, unbiased medium and at mid-century, The Lancet hailed it as \u00C2\u0093the Art of Truth,\u00C2\u0094 implicitly critiquing the artistic licence that illustrators had employed.24 If photography could show \u00C2\u0093truth,\u00C2\u0094 the illustrators\u00C2\u0092 art was somehow artificial and false. Excitement about photography\u00C2\u0092s ability to depict \u00C2\u0093reality\u00C2\u0094 supposedly without artistic mediation was tempered by the technology\u00C2\u0092s initial shortcomings for anatomical application. Photography\u00C2\u0092s earliest incarnations were of minimal utility to anatomists. Black and white photographs failed to register the details of internal anatomy and instead rendered it as a muddied mass.25 The conventions of lithographic and engraved anatomy, such as cross-hatching and the use of colour, which made it possible to distinguish the different body parts, were absent in photography. Photographs of sufficient clarity for anatomical instruction would not be produced until the 1880s.26 The fact that photography was acclaimed decades before it was actually a viable tool for anatomists suggests a growing unease with the artistic style of representation. Maclise\u00C2\u0092s decision to draw in the artistic style constitutes a rejection of photography and its proponents. Attempts to emphasize reality in anatomy were not new. In fact, beginning in the 1680s, critics called for a boundary separating art and science that would eliminate the \u00C2\u0093niceties\u00C2\u0094 of the artists\u00C2\u0092 hand\u00C2\u0097metaphors and fantasy settings, for example. Gone were the ornate backdrops and exotic animals (hippopotamuses and other exotic animals were not infrequent additions in earlier works), and in its place the style of \u00C2\u0093realism\u00C2\u0094 emerged.27 Characterized by details such as ragged flesh and the appearance of pins, 24 Daniel M. Fox and Christopher Lawrence, Photographing Medicine: Images and Power in Britain and America since 1840 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988), 21. 25 Martin Kemp, foreword to The Physicians Art: Representations of Art and Medicine eds. Julie V. Hansen and Suzanne Porter (Durham, NC: Duke University, 1999), 15. 26 Fox and Lawrence, Photographing Medicine, 24. 27 See Bernhard Siegfried Albinus, Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis humani (London: H. Woodfall; J. & P. Knapton, 1749), Historical Anatomies on the Web, \u00C2\u0093Tables iv and viii,\u00C2\u0094 U.S. National 14 hoists, ropes and other dissecting tools, this style of anatomy\u00C2\u0097seen most famously in Great Britain in the work of William Hunter (1718-1783)\u00C2\u0097was concerned with rendering a particular, specific part of the body visible, and representing it as it was seen by the artist/anatomist during the act of dissection.28 The second moment of the larger transition to \u00C2\u0093realism\u00C2\u0094 came in the late- eighteenth century. In this shift, \u00C2\u0093anatomy was cleansed of its association with death.\u00C2\u0094 Termed \u00C2\u0093universalist\u00C2\u0094 because it universalized the body by uncoupling anatomy from the specific circumstances of dissection, the props and prosthetics of dissection (blocks, pins, ropes, etc.) and the dissecting table were removed and bodies appeared on empty backgrounds, without visual context.29 Increasingly, the anatomy appeared as parts (the internal organs or the nerves and muscles of the face, for example) without the rest of the body and was shown as diagrammatic line-drawings. This style slowly came to predominate anatomical illustration by the 1830s and 1840s. It reached its most famous and long-standing articulation in Gray\u00C2\u0092s Anatomy (1858); Gray\u00C2\u0092s Anatomy\u00C2\u0092s \u00C2\u0093dull engravings and layout and inconsistent additional plates drawn in various diagrammatic styles\u00C2\u0094 marked it for \u00C2\u0093serious,\u00C2\u0094 \u00C2\u0093professional\u00C2\u0094 medical study (figure 1).30 Gray\u00C2\u0092s Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health, Department of Health & Human Services, (accessed May 2, 2008); available at http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/historicalanatomies/albinus_home.html. 28 Michael Sappol, Dream Anatomy (Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, National Institutes of Health and National Library of Medicine, 2006), 28. 29 Ibid., 46. Of course, this linear narrative can be complicated. There certainly existed stylistic slippages, overlaps and syntheses that this trajectory, by virtue of being a broad schema, does not address. 30 Petherbridge and Jordanova, The Quick and the Dead, 96; Sappol, Dream Anatomy, 48; McGrath, Seeing Her Sex, 7. Figure 1. The External Oblique Muscle. Anatomy, Descriptive and Surgical (\u00C2\u0093Gray\u00C2\u0092s Anatomy\u00C2\u0094) 15 Anatomy, for example, excised the artistry and multitude of connotations that were the signature of artistic anatomy; instead it was clinical and detailed in the way it showed the human body. In practice, these stylistic shifts were considerably messier. For example, Maclise\u00C2\u0092s work contains hallmarks of each of these different periods. Some of his figures look alive (figure 2), or are restrained with ropes as in \u00C2\u0093realism\u00C2\u0094 (figure 3), and others are drawn in the diagrammatic, \u00C2\u0093universalist\u00C2\u0094 style where line-drawn diagrams float on a blank background, utterly devoid of context (figure 4). Figure 2. Plate 10: The surgical dissection of the sterno-clavicular or tracheal region, and the relative position of its main bloodvessels, nerves, &c. Surgical Anatomy Figure 3. Plate 65-66: The surgical dissection of the popliteal space and the posterior crural region. Surgical Anatomy 16 All four of Maclise\u00C2\u0092s major illustrative efforts (Anatomy of the Arteries, Comparative Osteology (1847), Surgical Anatomy and Dislocations and Fractures (1858)) demonstrate movements back and forth between the categories of \u00C2\u0093realism\u00C2\u0094 and \u00C2\u0093universalism.\u00C2\u0094 These movements suggest that Maclise recognized the different representational possibilities and connotations that different styles expressed. Maclise\u00C2\u0092s illustrations in Surgical Anatomy deployed these various styles simultaneously, and with purpose. His use of diagrammatic line-drawings constituted an experiment in newer modes and he seemed to use them exclusively to illustrate pathologies of the male reproductive organs. This suggests that the male reproductive organs most required the \u00C2\u0093safety\u00C2\u0094 offered by the abstract representational mode. As well, it suggests that while the normal, healthy body was represented as whole, pathology was divorced from this norm and represented as decontextualized. In the preface to his large volume, Maclise states that he has laid emphasis on \u00C2\u0093imitating the character of the normal Figure 4. Plate 64, fig. 6: Deformities of the urinary bladder-the operations of sounding for stone, of catheterism and of puncturing the bladder above the pubes. Surgical Anatomy 17 form of the human figure.\u00C2\u009431 What becomes evident, however, is that \u00C2\u0093normal\u00C2\u0094 did not connote \u00C2\u0093typical.\u00C2\u0094 Maclise presented his readership with images of bodies that were anything but ordinary.32 Judging by Maclise\u00C2\u0092s standards, the \u00C2\u0093normal\u00C2\u0094 body\u00C2\u0097that is, the body in a state of health against which the body in a state of disease could be judged\u00C2\u0097 was an attractive, young, noble and alive-looking white man\u00C2\u0092s body.33 They have been characterized by one scholar as \u00C2\u0093perhaps the most romantically noble dissected figures that have been produced,\u00C2\u0094 emphasizing the effect of their artistry.34 With the exception of one plate, which does more to draw attention to their absence than to their inclusion, women\u00C2\u0092s bodies are notably missing. Likewise, Maclise excludes the bodies of people of colour. His images attest to a near-exclusive interest in white masculinity. For him, the healthy white man was a model of health, as both a medical ideal and an ideal of the national \u00C2\u0093type.\u00C2\u0094 One of the ways that Maclise articulated his idea of the ideal national type was by showing how he might look. In doing this, he borrowed from the visual conventions of classical beauty. Eighteenth and nineteenth-century social advocates had called on classicism to support discourses that argued that outward beauty was mirrored by internal moral perfection. The fact that classicism was associated with a problematic erotic tradition, as will be discussed below, made its integration into medical national fitness campaigns difficult. 31 Maclise, Surgical Anatomy, vi. 32 The normal, in scientific parlance, became synonymous with the optimal or desired in the 1820s, complicating existing definitions of the normal that connoted the typical or ordinary. Hence, what was \u00C2\u0093normal\u00C2\u0094 began to acquire immense value as it was associated with the desired, or perfected, state. Oxford English Dictionary Online, \u00C2\u0093normal,\u00C2\u0094 Oxford English Dictionary (accessed April 30, 2008); available from http://dictionary.oed.com. 33 The issue of looking alive is one that plagued the anatomical profession since it touches on the epistemological problem of anatomy: how can one learn about living anatomy by examining dead bodies? 34 K.B. Roberts and J.D.W. Tomlinson, The Fabric of the Body: European Traditions of Anatomical Illustration (Oxford: Clarendon, 1992), 565. 18 During this era, anxiety over potentially sexually explicit visual material abounded and culminated in the Obscene Publications Act in 1857, which defined obscenity and pornography and facilitated arrest and prosecution for these crimes. In this moral climate, the changes in anatomical style described above (and that were happening at roughly this time) can be seen as an attempt to close-down potential sexual meanings in anatomical illustrations. The overlap between pornography and medicine was of sufficient concern that by the second half of the nineteenth century, anatomies had become \u00C2\u0093vague in anatomical and functional detail\u00C2\u0094 in an attempt to not appear prurient and to avoid scrutiny from anti-vice organizations.35 The shift towards \u00C2\u0093universalist\u00C2\u0094 illustration was thus precipitated by a desire to excise the potential for sexually transgressive meanings to exist in medical texts. The explanation offered by scholars to date\u00C2\u0097that the shift was a result of changing notions of realism and the desire to depict anatomy more clearly\u00C2\u0097is only a partial account.36 What was illegible or unclear about anatomical drawing was not its ability to render the parts of the body understandable for medical instruction\u00C2\u0097clearly Maclise\u00C2\u0092s remarks on anatomy\u00C2\u0092s obsolescence suggest that he thought this had already been accomplished. Instead, it was the meanings that were associated with anatomy that resisted singularity and clarity. Various representational styles influenced anatomy since visual genres are neither discrete nor insulated from each other. These external influences primed people to view the images in potentially problematic ways and helped to create this crisis in representation. In anatomy particularly, where the epistemology was visual\u00C2\u0097knowledge 35 Edward J. Bristow, Vice and Vigilance: Purity Movements in Britain Since 1700 (Dublin: Gill and MacMillan, 1977), 126. 36 Sappol, Dream Anatomy, 46-48. 19 was gained through sight and viewing37\u00C2\u0097careful management was necessary in order to convey the \u00C2\u0093correct,\u00C2\u0094 non-transgressive, non-erotic meaning. In fact, pornography and anatomy had long been popularly associated, since dissection was seen as a way of \u00C2\u0093undressing the body\u00C2\u0094 and anatomical illustration \u00C2\u0093was the only legitimate domain in which male and female genitals could receive detailed representation.\u00C2\u009438 Thus, anatomical illustration\u00C2\u0092s proximity to illicit pornography (they both represented naked bodies) gave anatomical illustration its own sexual cachet. Thomas Laqueur has shown that medical texts that were intended to be instructional could assume multiple identities; the work, Onania: or, The Heinous Sin of Self Pollution, and all its Frightful Consequences, published in 1710, was at various points tied to the quack medicine market, seen as a high-minded religious and pedagogical work, and used as \u00C2\u0093scurrilous semipornography.\u00C2\u009439 The ease with which texts intended for medical or pedagogical use could assume pornographic meanings demonstrates how closely pornography and medicine were associated with one another in the public mind. Even an intentionally medical work could easy become \u00C2\u0093pornographic.\u00C2\u0094 So close was the association between pornography and anatomy, some authors began intentionally using medicine as a vehicle for provoking sexual arousal. In 1821 in London, Dr. T. Bell authored Kalogynomia, or The Laws of Female Beauty, published by J.J. Stockdale, a volume that appropriated the medical apparatus to address \u00C2\u0093Kalogynomists,\u00C2\u0094 or connoisseurs of female beauty, as scientists of women. Bell 37 Jordanova, Nature Displayed, 6, 191; Jordanova, Sexual Visions, 6. 38 Sappol, Dream Anatomy, 34. 39 Thomas W. Laqueur, Solitary Sex: A Cultural History of Masturbation (New York: Zone Books, 2003), 26-31. 20 acknowledges the book\u00C2\u0092s potent sexual connotations and provides an ironically precautionary introduction: plates 10, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 and 24 should not be carelessly exposed either to Ladies or to Young Persons. These Plates are therefore stitched up separately. As the work is a scientific one, and calculated both by its mode of construction and by its price for the higher and more reflecting class of readers, and as the plates above enumerated are also entirely scientific and anatomical, the Publisher might have dispensed with this precaution; but he is anxious that these readers should have it in their power to obviate the possibility of the careless exposure of such anatomical Plates.40 Thus, in one quick gesture, the author made a bid for the legitimacy of his enterprise because of its proclaimed scientific merit and tone, while simultaneously advertising the explicitness of the illustrations contained therein. Even as the Kalogynomia invoked the authority of medicine, its contents differed dramatically from anatomical texts. Rather than instruction on pathology and health and the anatomical details of the body, readers are given a discussion of female physical beauty. Whereas Maclise refrains from discussing love and sexual intercourse entirely and labels his work in highly specialized, technical vocabulary, Bell\u00C2\u0092s chapter titles refer to his preoccupation with these subjects: \u00C2\u0093Of Beauty,\u00C2\u0094 \u00C2\u0093Of Love,\u00C2\u0094 \u00C2\u0093Of Sexual Intercourse,\u00C2\u0094 and \u00C2\u0093Of the Laws Regulating that Intercourse.\u00C2\u0094 Although his work is on the topic of women\u00C2\u0092s beauty, Bell\u00C2\u0092s volume contains numerous plates of erect penises, perhaps representing the sexual stimulation that results from the female beauty discussed (figure 5). 40 T. Bell, Kalogynomia, Or The Laws of Female Beauty (London: J.J. Stockdale, 1821), i. 21 The introduction then lingers over a description of a woman\u00C2\u0092s body, enticing readers to imagine her body and the way it feels: we observe a woman possessing one species of beauty:\u00C2\u0097Her neck is tapering; her shoulders, without being angular, are sufficiently broad and definite; her waist remarkable for fine proportion, is almost an inverted cone; her haunches are moderately expanded; her thighs proportional \u00C2\u0085 and you would imagine that if your hands were placed under the lateral parts of her tapering waist, the slightest pressure would suffice to throw her into the air.41 41 Ibid., 2. Figure 5. Plate X: External Views of the Male and Female Organs of Generation, Kalogynomia 22 The eroticisation of this interaction\u00C2\u0097imagining touching the woman and the implied pleasure of tossing her in the air\u00C2\u0097is inconsistent with contemporary medical texts where the contact between doctors and patients is described in more distanced terms and lacks the evocation of pleasure. For example, Maclise\u00C2\u0092s lengthy discussions of catheterization emphasize the lack of touching and the reliance on instruments for examining bodies, rather than the laying of hands that Bell describes; Maclise remarks on the \u00C2\u0093fruitless effort made\u00C2\u0094 of catheterization when a practitioner is forced to work \u00C2\u0093by hand without a [mechanical] guide.\u00C2\u009442 The Kalogynomia proceeds to classify the three types of beauty and these classifications are illustrated using supposedly anatomical principles.43 In practice, however the Kalogynomia seems more a catalogue of arousing descriptions of women\u00C2\u0092s bodies. Bell also discusses the pleasure of sexual intercourse, which is atypical of medical texts. He describes the stimulation felt \u00C2\u0093when the penis is erect, or when during coition the glans is to receive the most exquisite and sensible impressions.\u00C2\u009444 Bell used the mantle of science to shield the Kalogynomia from accusations of prurience. In light of the sexual explicitness of the text, however, it is difficult to imagine that any audience, even the \u00C2\u0093higher class\u00C2\u0094 of readers Bell claimed to envisage as his audience, would be immune to the sexual undertones of the work. The Kalogynomia was not an isolated work of medical-pornography; there seems to have been a number of these types of work. The Generative System of John Roberton, 42 Maclise, Surgical Anatomy, 126-127. Anxieties that existed about touching bodies prompted a turn to instruments to distance the practitioner from the intimacy of manual examination. One such case, from 1816 in France, involved the physician La\u00C2\u0092nnec who was hesitant to touch a young woman whose \u00C2\u0093sex and fullness of figure\u00C2\u0094 prevented \u00C2\u0093immediate auscultation.\u00C2\u0094 His reluctance prompted the use of a rolled tube of paper to listen to the patient\u00C2\u0092s heart, and the invention of a rudimentary stethoscope. Peter Warren and Faye Warren, \u00C2\u0093Window on the Breast: 19th Century English Developments in Pulmonary Diagnosis,\u00C2\u0094 Lancet 349, no. 9054 (March 15, 1997): 798. 43 Bell, Kalogynomia, 49. 44 Ibid., 166. 23 published in 1824 by the same publisher as the Kalogynomia (J.J. Stockdale), also seems to have intentionally elided the distinction between pornography and anatomy.45 This volume, which depicted erect penises, copious pubic hair and a plate depicting a woman\u00C2\u0092s genitals, was criticized by contemporaries for being more concerned with stimulating sexual desire than with teaching about medicine or disease.46 In fact, like the Kalogynomia, it describes the process of male sexual stimulation in terms quite unlike those seen in contemporary medical texts: \u00C2\u0093the secretion of semen proceeds without our consciousness, yet certain states of mind excited the testicles to an increased action, far beyond that which they usually possess.\u00C2\u009447 The discussion of sexual excitement and stimulation in these terms, emphasizing the pleasure that results from sexual daydreams or fantasies sets it apart from \u00C2\u0093serious\u00C2\u0094 medicine. The illustration shown here is also unlike those in medical texts. Viewers are given explicit visual evidence of coition by the depiction of the erect penis penetrating the vagina during intercourse (figure 6). The 45 The complex circuits of illicit bookselling and printing are important, but are not the subject of sustained discussion here. For informative works, see Lisa Sigel, Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815-1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002) and Lynda Nead, Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). 46 McGrath, Seeing Her Sex, 38. 47 Thomas Little, The Generative System of John Roberton 5th ed. (London: J.J. Stockdale, 1824), 37. Figure 6. Plate XVI: Suction and Collapse of the Vagina. Generative System of John Roberton. 24 volume incited tremendous controversy and was made central to proceedings concerning the emerging legal definition of obscenity in the 1830s after it was discovered being read by prisoners.48 The precedent set by pseudo-medical works created problems for the field of anatomy. It became even more necessary, in light of these texts, to differentiate oneself from these pornographers. Little and Maclise\u00C2\u0092s volumes have numerous stylistic differences, and it is not my intention to suggest that Maclise\u00C2\u0092s work was pseudo-medical or overtly pornographic in nature. However, Surgical Anatomy shares some affinities with these texts in its eroticism. Although Maclise could differentiate himself through his medical language from these works of semipornography and limit interpretative latitude, the images resisted control. The slipperiness of these visual registers opened up the possibility for sexual and erotic interpretations. The positioning of Maclise\u00C2\u0092s subjects have erotic connotations. With their open legs, heads thrown back, and recumbent bodies they clearly reveal the parts of the body being dissected, they also suggest the ecstasy of sexual passion and the moment of orgasm. In plate 8, the figure's tilted-back head, parted lips, closed eyes and relaxed facial expression suggest the fulfillment of sexual desire (figure 7). While his head and extended neck are arranged in the surgical position for instructional purposes, certainly the position of the head has multiple connotations, only one of which is didactic. Coupled with his closed eyes, and gently parted lips, this image evokes an erotic reading. 48 McGrath, Seeing Her Sex, 58. That Little\u00C2\u0092s volume came under scrutiny only after it was discovered in the possession of low-class prisoners suggests the importance of class in the regulation of pornographic materials. Again, we see what could be considered pornographic in the hands of the lower classes might be consumed unproblematically by classically-trained elites. However, Maclise\u00C2\u0092s experience suggests otherwise that is was not always the case. 25 The figures are also all attractive, and attractively displayed; they have clean, unblemished skin, carefully sculpted eyebrows, expressive features and soft lips. The likelihood that Maclise\u00C2\u0092s cadavers were\u00C2\u0097like the majority of dissecting cadavers in England and France\u00C2\u0097drawn from among the poor, is effaced. The bodies are clean and show no outward signs of hard living or destitution; in fact, their hands are clean and free of calluses or other signs of labour (figure 8). Some process of erasure and insertion clearly accompanied the representation of the bodies although it is unclear whether this was undertaken post-mortem on the bodies themselves or if Maclise simply drew the bodies the way he wanted them to look. Whichever it was, it seems plausible that Maclise had a particular idea of the aesthetic he wanted to convey in his volumes, and manipulated the bodies, whether physically or pictorially, to suit his vision. The characteristics of the bodies themselves also have erotic connotations. They are well-proportioned, well-muscled and mostly hairless. Like the Kalogynomia, they are models Figure 7. Plate 8: The surgical dissection of the subclavian and carotid regions, and the relative anatomy of their contents. Surgical Anatomy Figure 8. Plate 18: The surgical dissection of the wrist and hand. Surgical Anatomy 26 of beauty. They are also languidly, sensually posed, with clearly-defined but slightly relaxed muscles; these are not men tensed for action, but rather assume the position of repose. Although the male body is not totally taut, as it is in other representational traditions such as images of the strongman, the correlation between phallic power and the ability of the flexed male body\u00C2\u0092s potential to exercise power is implicit in the figures\u00C2\u0092 poses.49 Their bodies are defined in such a way that the muscles are most attractively displayed, and they exhibit masculine power.50 This reading of phallic power is complicated, however, by the fact that the penises are all depicted as flaccid. This undermines associations with the erections of pornography by rendering the subjects literally impotent. Here, symbolic vulnerability is necessary; rather than be prosecuted for pornography, Maclise must be sure to show his subjects as devirilized. Maclise\u00C2\u0092s decision to portray\u00C2\u0097or, in some cases, his decision not to portray\u00C2\u0097 facial and body hair raised similar contradictory issues and defies easy analysis. Facial hair had multiple meanings and both its presence and absence were highly symbolic. Beardedness was seen as a marker of respectability, masculinity and class status during the Victorian \u00C2\u0093beard boom\u00C2\u0094 in the later third of the nineteenth century.51 In the earlier period, however, since regular barbering was prohibitively expensive, beardedness was an indicator of lower class status.52 Beardedness was also a symbol of virility and masculinity. In The Generative System of John Roberton, Little comments on the process of male sexual maturation, remarking that \u00C2\u0093when, however, [puberty] arrives the voice acquires a more masculine tone\u00C2\u0097the beard, and mustachios grow\u00C2\u0097the pubis is covered 49 Budd, Sculpture Machine, 63. 50 Ibid. 51 Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 61. 52 Justin Bengry, \u00C2\u0093Consuming Men: Shaving, Masculinities, and the Competition of Identity at the Fin de Siecle\u00C2\u0094 (master\u00C2\u0092s thesis, UBC, 2003), 12-13. 27 with hair, and, the semen, being also secreted, the male is then able to propagate his species.\u00C2\u009453 Here body and facial hair are directly associated with virility and the ability to procreate. The correlation of reproductive capacity and hair suggests that the appearance of hair designated a potent masculinity. Facial hair was also given racial significance and was used to mark the superiority of the \u00C2\u0093Caucasian or Bearded Type\u00C2\u0094 from the \u00C2\u0093Mongolic or Beardless Type.\u00C2\u009454 With this in mind, it seems that including facial hair is one way that Maclise empowers his figures as masculine models (figure 9). Others of his models are completely clean shaven (figure 10). This lack of facial hair displays their youthful, attractive features, but also runs the risk of associating clean- shavenness with a lack of proper masculinity. Not too long after Maclise was working, clean- shavenness became increasingly associated with \u00C2\u0093perverse\u00C2\u0094 sexual preferences; defendants in gross indecency trials during the 1890s, for example, were characterized by the press as having a \u00C2\u0093penchant for fashionable dress and a lack of facial hair.\u00C2\u009455 Even if in the 1850s Maclise\u00C2\u0092s clean-shaven men predated these 53 Little, Generative System of John Roberton, 36-37. 54 Londa Schiebinger, Nature\u00C2\u0092s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004), 122. 55 Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 61. Figure 9. Plate 7: The surgical dissection of the subclavian and carotid regions, the relative anatomy of their contents. Surgical Anatomy 28 explicit links to perversity, the lack of facial hair picks up on debates about masculinity and beardedness that were already being expressed. Similarly, as Little suggests, the appearance of body hair was seen as a marker of sexual virility.56 It is significant then that Maclise\u00C2\u0092s subjects are largely free of body hair. If manly men were hairy, why are his figures hairless? It seems unlikely, given the physicality and muscularity of the bodies shown, that Maclise was attempting to feminize or emasculate his figures. Rather, I would suggest that the omission of body hair serves to highlight the musculature of the body and to display it to advantage (figure 11). 56 Anthea Callen, The Spectacular Body: Science, Method and Meaning in the Work of Degas (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 85. Figure 10. Plate 26: The relation of the internal parts to the external surface. Surgical Anatomy 29 The appearance of pubic hair is thus surprising and is complicated by several representational traditions. In many of the plates pubic hair is absent or minimal, almost certainly an omission for the sake of decorum by Maclise (figure 12). The absence of pubic hair also suggests the problematic sexualizing of prepubescent bodies. However, while many of the illustrations erase the pubic hair entirely, others display it prominently, thus complicating any singular explanation of the existence of hair (figure 13). Figure 11. Plate 11: The surgical dissection of the axillary and brachial regions, displaying the relative order of their contained parts. Surgical Anatomy 30 In these varied portrayals it is possible to see an important moment of negotiation; hair and hairlessness both had a tradition that eroticised them. As we see in the discussion of The Generative System, and as Anne Hollander has shown, pubic hair was considered a marker of pornography.57 Thus, to draw pubic hair was problematic. Conversely, by 57 Anne Hollander, Seeing Through Clothes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 140. Figure 12. Plate 49: The relative anatomy of the male pelvic organs. Surgical Anatomy Figure 13. Plate 48: The relative anatomy of the male pelvic organs. Surgical Anatomy 31 removing the pubic hair, Maclise invoked a tradition of neoclassicism that was also eroticised.58 Every possible avenue of representation took him in proximity to troublesome representational traditions. Maclise\u00C2\u0092s ambivalence towards the representation of his figures\u00C2\u0092 masculinity carries through to his portrayal of their vulnerability. While the illustrations\u00C2\u0092 erotic and pornographic connotations work potentially to empower his subjects by ennobling them as virile, we should also note that they are also subjected to acts of violence. The symbols of violation inscribed in the drawings indicate an uneven distribution of power that privileges the practitioner. In many of the illustrations, ropes are attached to the figures\u00C2\u0092 wrists or ankles. In plates 66 (figure 14), the rope tied around the subject\u00C2\u0092s feet hobble him; he is restrained in what appears an act of coercion.59 Ropes were used in anatomy to tie the body securely in position so that the anatomy could be drawn. But by this period, the use of physical restraints, such as ropes or ties, was also part of a known repertoire of sexual practices. In the anonymous pornographic memoir My Secret Life, probably written in the 1880s, the narrator describes rigging up hooks and ropes from the ceiling in order to experiment with new sexual positions; he puts his female partner\u00C2\u0092s legs in the ropes \u00C2\u0093up to the knees, and she laid for ten minutes at a time with her legs in the 58 Although the conventions of ancient Greek sculpture had demanded that male pubic hair be shown, eighteenth-century and Victorian neoclassical sculptures often depicted extremely scant, or absent, pubic hair. 59 In conventional interpretations ropes serve two symbolic purposes: firstly, they remind viewers that the figures are dead, and that ropes and pulleys have been used to support limbs in their poses. Secondly, rope imagery in the pre-nineteenth-century context has been seen as an effort to emphasize the criminality of the models; before the Anatomy Act of 1832, cadavers were usually obtained from the hangman and rope carried immense moral and religious symbolism. Petherbridge and Jordanova, Quick and the Dead, 38. 32 air\u00C2\u0094 while being penetrated.60 A similar effort to restrain and prop the body in position motivated both My Secret Life\u00C2\u0092s narrator and anatomists. Maclise\u00C2\u0092s subjects are also vulnerable to surgical intervention. In plate 50, the figure on the far left has had his penis lopped off to reveal a cross-section of its interior (figure 15). The image suggests a man who is not whole, whose amputated penis serves as an emblem of the loss of his sexual vitality. 60 Anonymous, My Secret Life, ed. James Kincaid (New York: Signet Classic, 1996), 411-12. Although produced later than Maclise\u00C2\u0092s illustrations, it seems unlikely that the narrator of My Secret Life innovated this sexual practice. Figure 14. Plate 66: Surgical dissection of the popliteal space, and the posterior crural region. Surgical Anatomy 33 In contrast to this violence, Maclise\u00C2\u0092s written text and the shading on the edges of his drawings suggest his desire to preserve his subjects\u00C2\u0092 bodily integrity. He states that because the exterior of the body is a \u00C2\u0093map to the surgeon, explanatory of the anatomy arranged beneath\u00C2\u0094 it was his intention to leave \u00C2\u0093appended to the dissected regions as much of the undissected as was necessary\u00C2\u0094; however, this is done for the benefit of the practitioner, not out of consideration for the male subject\u00C2\u0092s bodily integrity.61 The figures are dominant in their surroundings, following the tradition of the male nude shown as \u00C2\u0093inhabiting and defining its own space\u00C2\u0094; their outstretched limbs and open eyes are looking about, symbolic of man\u00C2\u0092s \u00C2\u0093ownership of the world around,\u00C2\u0094 but they are also defined by the limits of the practitioner\u00C2\u0092s gaze and the frame of Maclise\u00C2\u0092s illustrations.62 61 Maclise, Surgical Anatomy, viii. 62 Anthea Callen, \u00C2\u0093Ideal Masculinities: An Anatomy of Power,\u00C2\u0094 in The Visual Culture Reader 2nd ed., ed. Nicholas Mirzoeff (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 611. Figure 15. Plate 50: The surgical dissection of the superficial structures of the male perin\u00C3\u00A6um. Surgical Anatomy 34 The intimate point of view afforded to the anatomist and the viewer in plates such as the one above would later become a hallmark of photographic pornography. By the 1880s, when photography gained popularity as a pornographic medium, photographers would position their models at \u00C2\u0093revealing angles\u00C2\u0094 to clearly show the \u00C2\u0093curves that two- dimensional representations tended to flatten.\u00C2\u0094 The models would thrust their pelvises forward and part their legs in order to emphasize the genitals, in much the same manner that Maclise shows his models positioned. The genitals were also made the focal point by being positioned in the centre of the photograph. Pornographers used many of the same visual techniques frequently used by anatomists to draw attention to the parts of the body most interesting and relevant to their genre.63 As these examples make clear, there were significant overlaps between the medical and pornographic vocabularies. Roberta McGrath has argued that anatomy is a site where \u00C2\u0093science and pornography meet and fuse,\u00C2\u0094 since by definition both are \u00C2\u0093necessarily explicit.\u00C2\u009464 Maclise\u00C2\u0092s illustrations exemplify this fusion. The persistence of this erotic symbolism and its attachment to medicine made medical illustration a difficult genre. The anatomist needed to carefully navigate the sexual-medical terrain by including sufficient detail to make their illustrations educational and visually appealing, while avoiding the suggestion of sexual explicitness. In the interest in purging their texts of sexual symbolism and associations, anatomists turned to the Greek ideal. Classicism was one available cultural script which enabled them to respond to the controversies raised by pornographic works like The 63 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, 104. 64 Roberta McGrath, Seeing Her Sex, 3; Ludmilla Jordanova, \u00C2\u0093Medicine and Genres of Display\u00C2\u0094 in Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances, eds. Lynne Cooke and Peter Woolen (Seattle, WA: Bay Press, 1995), 211. 35 Generative System of John Roberton and the Kalogynomia. Classicism, it was believed, invested the nude body with an ideal and timeless quality. Without something to elevate it above the naked flesh shown in pornography, the nude body was vulnerable to accusations of sensuality. As we shall see, however, elevating the nude with classicism was an incomplete solution, since the Greek ideal evoked another set of sexual connotations. Since Maclise could not control his work\u00C2\u0092s circulation or audience beyond a limited degree, it was imperative that he, along with other practitioners and anatomists, demonstrate their credentials and authority to avoid being labelled quacks, or worse, pornographers. One of the ways this was accomplished was by invoking the doctor\u00C2\u0092s classical heritage and his classical learning, since classicism was supposed to elevate the base, material, and bodily to a higher plane.65 The authority of Greek culture gave anatomy an air of respectability and authority by invoking ideas of reason, political enlightenment, and justice.66 To prevent public scrutiny and to demarcate themselves from quacks and other \u00C2\u0093illegitimate\u00C2\u0094 practitioners, doctors sought to emphasize their \u00C2\u0093gentlemanly attributes and appeals to science.\u00C2\u009467 Certainly a classical consciousness and education was one of these \u00C2\u0093gentlemanly\u00C2\u0094 qualities. Medical leaders, particularly in London where Maclise was educated and trained as a surgeon, emphasized the importance of a more general education in classics and other fields, rather than a strictly technical, medical education. The proper moral and analytic foundations for medical practice were provided by a thorough classical education. Although some applauded the downfall of classical education in favour of a \u00C2\u0093modern and scientific education,\u00C2\u0094 others 65 Jordanova, \u00C2\u0093Medicine and Genres of Display,\u00C2\u0094 207. 66 Callen, Spectacular Body, 11. 67 Jordanova, \u00C2\u0093Medicine and Genres of Display,\u00C2\u0094 206. 36 believed that the gentlemanly foundations of medicine would be corrupted if classics were discarded.68 Neoclassicism also supported an ideology of national fitness that anatomists\u00C2\u0097as proponents of bodily health\u00C2\u0097were keen to advocate. Anxieties about the weaknesses (physical and moral) of an English populace enervated by the process of industrialisation and the attendant difficulties of urban living motivated the search for new models of physical and moral health.69 Social commentators seized upon the notion of classicism. For them, the ideal, aesthetically perfect body was synonymous with a healthy body, and a stable political culture.70 This concept was extrapolated to apply to the nation as a whole. If its people could aspire to physical perfection, England would be a robust, strong nation. This notion of nationalism, however, was a gendered one. Premised upon the masculine ideal suggested by the neoclassical aesthetic, model citizens were muscular, youthful male figures who symbolized the nation.71 Notions of manliness \u00C2\u0093based upon the Greek revival\u00C2\u0094 constituted a new discourse in masculine citizenship, one that shifted away from martial masculinity in favour of a political discourse of civic responsibility.72 Thus, the classical model became an aspirational cultural script. Although gender is foregrounded in this discourse, sexuality has only an implied role\u00C2\u0097 68 Christopher Lawrence, \u00C2\u0093Incommunicable Knowledge: Science, Technology and the Clinical Art in Britain, 1850-1914,\u00C2\u0094 in \u00C2\u0093Medicine, History and Society,\u00C2\u0094 special issue, Journal of Contemporary History 20, no. 4 (Oct. 1985): 508. 69 Tamar Garb, Bodies of Modernity: Figure and Flesh in Fin-de-Siecle France (London: Thames and Hudson, 1998), 68. 70 Jordanova, Nature Displayed, 192; Callen, Spectacular Body, 10; Christopher Stray, Classics Transformed: Schools, Universities, and Society in England, 1830-1960 (London and New York: Clarendon, 1998), 18. 71 Mosse, Nationalism and Sexuality, 14. 72 Ibid., 13; Dowling, Hellenism and Homosexuality, 4, 61. This is a contentious issue. Some historians, such as Mosse and John Tosh, have argued that the existence of martial masculinity declined in Britain following 1815 and Napoleon\u00C2\u0092s defeat. Others have argued for its perseverance through the age of Empire, for example, see Heather Streets, Martial Races: The Military, Race and Masculinity in British Imperial Culture, 1857-1914 (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 2004). 37 namely that healthy parents give birth to healthy babies that then go on to produce and fight for a healthy nation. Like social commentators and politicians, the medical profession also appropriated the discourse of classical perfection. The muscular, perfect-looking body was a healthy body and this external perfection was mirrored internally in the absence of pathology. This Victorian notion borrowed from an existing tradition, since for several centuries classical sculpture had influenced anatomy. For example, Soemmering\u00C2\u0092s drawings of skeletons were based on postures found in the Venus de Medici and the Venus of Dresden. Far from being free from cultural values, however, anatomy helped to create new gendered, racialized and classed norms. Londa Schiebinger\u00C2\u0092s work on anatomical skeletons has shown that classical proportions had important implications for contemporary ideas of masculinity and femininity.73 Maclise\u00C2\u0092s illustrations do similar gendered and racialized work. The figures he portrays are white male bodies and fit neatly into the civic ideal suggested by Hellenism. These images of \u00C2\u0093normal\u00C2\u0094 white men are in contrast with other racialized images in circulation at the time. Ethnographers and anthropologists were growing increasingly interested in classifying and measuring indigenous colonial peoples through comparative anatomy and physiognomy. The racism and exploitation that characterized many of these encounters has been well observed in scholarship.74 According to Athena Leoussi, the \u00C2\u0093rise of Greek subjects in English painting and sculpture, and especially of the male nude, should be considered as 73 Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex: Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 200. For example, the size of a woman\u00C2\u0092s hips and pelvis in anatomies influenced by classical sculpture were used to naturalize and essentialize arguments for women\u00C2\u0092s reproductive roles. 74 Shawn Michelle Smith, Photography on the Color Line: W.E.B. DuBois, Race, and Visual Culture (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2004), 47-49. 38 an outcome of the social acceptance of racial theories from 1850 onwards.\u00C2\u009475 Maclise\u00C2\u0092s illustrations also literally \u00C2\u0093whitewash\u00C2\u0094 the figures; their bodies are not only white but also unblemished and unscarred. They are artistic and national models, and are examples to be emulated; for many groups, however, such as women, people of colour and the so- called unrespectable working classes, the participation in the political nation that they exemplified could be aspired to but never achieved. The perfection of Maclise\u00C2\u0092s subjects\u00C2\u0097muscular neoclassical physiques, bodies unmarked by hard work, disease or disfigurement\u00C2\u0097suggest that these are the types of men to improve the English racial stock; not the reedy, enervated workers of the urban slums. The concern with national fitness was intricately wound up in imperial discourses.76 Anatomy created meanings that invoked gendered and racialized values, while situating sexuality and eroticism on the margins. It is unlikely, however, that classicism was effective in these efforts to desexualize anatomy. The kinds of people most feared for their \u00C2\u0093mis-interpretations\u00C2\u0094 of anatomical works\u00C2\u0097the working classes specifically\u00C2\u0097largely lacked the formal classical education that contemporaries argued was required to process images of the nude male body as non-erotic. While classicisation may have been a bid to de-eroticise anatomical images, it is hardly clear whether it achieved any measure of success. Hellenism was already highly eroticised, and was well on its way to becoming homoerotic. In many cases, classicism serves to provoke erotic responses rather than to forestall them. In one such story, the Edinburgh-born doctor and anatomist, Robert Knox, was prompted to view one of his cadavers in erotic terms because of the visual 75 Athena S. Leoussi, Nationalism and Classicism: The Classical Body as National Symbol in Nineteenth-Century England and France (Houndmills, Hampshire and London: Macmillan, 1998), 158. 76 Budd, Sculpture Machine, 77. 39 parameters of classicism. In 1828, Knox reportedly refused to dissect the body of Mary Paterson because he was struck by her beauty. It has been argued that Knox saw Mary Paterson as \u00C2\u0093a woman at the peak of the kind of beauty he was later to argue was the epitome of human civilisation, that of classical Greece\u00C2\u0094 and was thus loathe to dissect her.77 Instead, he asked an artist, J. Oliphant, to sketch her, and \u00C2\u0093then preserved her whole in a tub of whisky for three months.\u00C2\u009478 In this example, the classical aesthetic became implicated in an almost necrophiliac response. In a decidedly less macabre story, classical statuary was seen as sexually attractive. In the Kalogynomia the author demonstrates his attraction for the Venus de Medici. He describes \u00C2\u0093the admirable form of the mamm\u00C3\u00A6, whence man first learns ideal beauty, which, without being too large, occupy the bosom, rise from it with nearly equal curves on every side\u00C2\u0094 and then lingers over the description of the rest of her body including the \u00C2\u0093beautiful elevation of the mons veneris.\u00C2\u0094 79 The statue gallery is an instructional site for a man\u00C2\u0092s sexual development and a place where female genitals are on display; it is here he \u00C2\u0093first learns ideal beauty.\u00C2\u0094 Having lost himself in revelling over the Venus\u00C2\u0092s body, the author snaps out of his daydream, remarking in a footnote that \u00C2\u0093the writer forgot it was a statue of which he was speaking!\u00C2\u0094 calling attention to the slippage between attraction for the living and the non-living.80 Moral authorities believed that the viewers who had sexual responses to art were those lower-classes who lacked the \u00C2\u0093elevated intent demanded by high culture\u00C2\u0094 to look beyond the nakedness of the classical 77 Helen MacDonald, Human Remains: Dissection and its Histories (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 36, 18. Knox explicates his views on ancient Greek beauty in his work Races of Men: A Philosophical Inquiry (London: Henry Renshaw, 1862). 78 MacDonald, Human Remains, 34. 79 Bell, Kalogynomia, 71, 73. 80 Ibid., 73. 40 statue. Instead, they responded basely to the content of the image (naked bodies) instead of its \u00C2\u0093formal qualities.\u00C2\u009481 The possibility that classical beauty could be so powerful as to compel attraction to a non-living object demonstrates classicism\u00C2\u0092s power over the Victorian erotic imagination. With this is mind, it is not difficult to see how classicism could render anatomical forms sexually compelling.82 The anecdotes discussed above demonstrate how the statue galleries of museums and galleries were important sexual sites for (hetero)sexual gazing. Later stories discuss their relevance to homosexual men. The British Museum provided titillation for one man in particular, who commented in 1883: \u00C2\u0093I revelled in the sight of pictures and statues of male form \u00C2\u0085 and could not keep from kissing [them].\u00C2\u009483 This notion of the museum as a space for sexual liaison would be later raised in E.M. Forester\u00C2\u0092s novel Maurice (1914) in which two male lovers arrange to meet at the British Museum. Here, the contact between a middle class man and his working class lover reveals the museum not only as a space for sexual contact, but also as a space where cross-class sexual connections were possible.84 According to most accounts, the confluence of Hellenism and homoeroticism was submerged for much of the nineteenth century. In this argument, the tradition of \u00C2\u0093Hellenizing homosexuality\u00C2\u0094 arose in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century 81 Lynda Nead, The Female Nude: Art, Obscenity and Sexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 1992), 88. 82 Certainly by the 1880s, when the anonymous pornographic memoir, My Secret Life, is believed to have been written, Greek statuary is clearly portrayed as enabling seduction. The narrator uses the occasion of viewing a Greek nude male sculpture to lead an unfamiliar female acquaintance into a discussion that \u00C2\u0093ran as closely to the border of decency that [he] could,\u00C2\u0094 which included a discussion of the appearance of the sculpture\u00C2\u0092s pubic hair. The narrator feels, at this point, that the discussion of the sculpture\u00C2\u0092s nudity has made the woman want \u00C2\u0093to hear talk suggesting sexual pleasure,\u00C2\u0094 and they proceeded back to their lodgings for a sexual encounter. Anonymous, My Secret Life, 270-71. 83 Quoted in Cook, London and the Culture of Homosexuality, 33, 86. 84 This is not to suggest that the public space of the British Museum held sexual possibilities or connotations to all. 41 with gentlemen collectors, such as Richard Payne Knight (1751-1824).85 Payne Knight wrote A Discourse on The Worship of the Priapus in 1786 in which he argued that phallic worship had an unbroken history from ancient Greece to the contemporary world.86 The tradition then supposedly \u00C2\u0093dives underground\u00C2\u0094 for the duration of the nineteenth century and reappears only in the 1880s and 1890s with Oscar Wilde and the emergence of Victorian Aestheticism.87 However, classicism and notions of \u00C2\u0093Greekness\u00C2\u0094 remained in circulation throughout this period; episodes such as the acquisition of the Elgin Marbles by the British Museum in 1816 demonstrate this point. Emphasizing the ways that classicism remained connected to sexuality in these intervening decades lays the basis for connecting the historiographies of early-nineteenth century Greek-inspired Republicanism and late-nineteenth century Hellenism. Rather than seeing a long period when Greek sexuality ceased to play a significant role in Victorian culture, I would argue that attending to the ways in which the suggestion of Greek homoeroticism popped up in licit locations such as anatomy provides a context for what is otherwise the \u00C2\u0093sudden\u00C2\u0094 emergence of late-Victorian aestheticism. Medical illustration is part of the \u00C2\u0093underground\u00C2\u0094 where Hellenism existed during this intervening period. Since the neoclassical revival highlighted homoerotic tendencies, especially in the writings of Johann Winckelmann, medicine\u00C2\u0092s adoption of neoclassicism was similarly tinged. Winckelmann, a German art critic, provided a vocabulary with which to admire the nude male bodies of antiquity. For men who loved men, Winckelmann\u00C2\u0092s Reflections 85 H.G. Cocks and Matt Houlbrook, eds., Palgrave Advances in the Modern History of Sexuality (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2006), 3. 86 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, 72. The reprinting of Worship of the Priapus in 1865 in London by J.C. Hotten suggests the continuing popularity of these notions of ancient sexuality. 87 Stray, Classics Transformed, 81; Ian Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes in the Sculpture Galleries of the British Museum 1800-1939 (London: British Museum Press, 1992), 10. 42 on the Paintings and Sculpture of the Greeks (translated to English and published in 1765) and History of Ancient Art (published in 1774) provided an important discussion of ancient Greek admiration and love between men; for some Victorian men, this was crucial in helping them to understand their own sexuality.88 There is some debate about whether Winckelmann\u00C2\u0092s volumes were available in England by the 1850s. Although Alex Potts argues that History of Ancient Art was only available in English \u00C2\u0093in a rather inaccessible American edition some ninety years after its initial publication\u00C2\u0094 and that Winckelmann \u00C2\u0093was no cultural icon or hero figure among British Victorian intellectuals,\u00C2\u009489 references to Winckelmann began appearing in the Times as early as 1836, and by 1850 notices of an edition translated from the German by G.H. Lodge\u00C2\u0097 including highly favourable reviews from The Spectator\u00C2\u0097advertised History of Ancient Art for sale in London for 12 shillings.90 Winckelmann\u00C2\u0092s ideas were also taken up by the sculptor Richard Westmacott the Younger between 1841 and 1860 and were fundamental in shaping the English view of ancient Greece.91 Winckelmann\u00C2\u0092s work exemplifies the paradox of neoclassicism; it expresses the elevating calm and the absence of emotion with \u00C2\u0093an intense awareness of the kinds of erotic and at times sado-masochistic fantasy that could be woven around such representations of the body beautiful.\u00C2\u009492 Characterized by scholars as conveying an \u00C2\u0093unapologetically sensuous homoeroticism,\u00C2\u0094 Winckelmann identifies the finely-formed, Greek male nude as the erotic ideal.93 Winckelmann\u00C2\u0092s identification of the ultimate 88 Walter Pater\u00C2\u0092s essay on Winckelmann has been often cited in support of this claim. 89 Potts, Flesh and The Ideal, 240. 90 Times (London), March 7, 1850, 10; Times (London), August 27, 1850, 11. 91 Frank M. Turner, The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1981), 47. 92 Potts, Flesh and the Ideal, 2. 93 Ibid., 5. 43 object of desire as the masculine, male body rather than the female body destabilizes the \u00C2\u0093conventional heterosexist ideology,\u00C2\u0094 as Potts has successfully shown.94 Thus, the neoclassical male body gained purchase as an erotic object. Maclise\u00C2\u0092s neoclassical tendencies demonstrate how the homoerotic could be seen in mid-nineteenth-century medicine. He was certainly intrigued by classicism and the Greeks. Evidence within his work suggested that Maclise travelled extensively in Greece. In the preface to his work Dislocations and Fractures (1858), Maclise states that the \u00C2\u0093crippled guide\u00C2\u0094 who he \u00C2\u0093witnessed\u00C2\u0094 in \u00C2\u0093the ruins of the Athenian Acropolis\u00C2\u0094 inspired him to remember the real-life necessity of his work.95 Maclise, in this rather offhand comment, reveals that he has visited this ancient archaeological site in Greece that in the early-nineteenth century was being excavated and, along with the acquisition of the so-called Elgin Marbles by the British Museum, prompted an increased interest in Hellenism.96 Maclise\u00C2\u0092s interest in classicism is also apparent in the illustrations themselves. His interest in male musculature and his depiction of muscles as flexed with vitality is a hallmark of neoclassicism. It is also a particular aesthetic choice, given that Maclise\u00C2\u0092s anatomical cadavers would have had flaccid muscles. Plate 13 is a typically neoclassical image (figure 16): the beautiful, youthful-looking but mature man\u00C2\u0092s supple and lithe figure extends throughout the frame and his rippling abdominal muscles capture the viewer\u00C2\u0092s attention. There are, however, some distinct differences between Maclise\u00C2\u0092s male figures and the male figures of the neoclassical tradition. Neoclassicism avoided portraying details such as veins and sinews, which disrupted the supposed perfection of 94 Ibid., 113. 95 Joseph Maclise, On Dislocations and Fractures (London: John Churchill, 1859), 1. 96 Jenkins, Archaeologists and Aesthetes, 24, 15. 44 the body. Maclise, on the other hand, depicted the viscera of his male nudes in vivid detail.97 Thus, Maclise\u00C2\u0092s figures suggest a particularly medical understanding of the neoclassical notion of perfection. Eroticism was a problem circulating around Hellenism but it was also a larger problem about the place of the nude in art more generally. Discourses of high art were used, like classicism, as a way to elevate and civilize the unclothed body, allegedly de- sexualizing it. High art was supposedly of an \u00C2\u0093elevated, spiritual order, not the blatant sexuality associated with body hair.\u00C2\u009498 In England, however, debates about the status of the nude in art destabilized high art\u00C2\u0092s claims to an elevated position. Thus, while formal artistic conventions were meant to insulate images of nudes from criticism, increasingly the nude came under attack. Maclise\u00C2\u0092s high-art sensibilities have been attested to by recent commentators on anatomy. They have observed that his \u00C2\u0093images have little to do with the dissecting room\u00C2\u0094 and the figures, who appear \u00C2\u0093god-like\u00C2\u0094 are indeed those of \u00C2\u0093\u00C2\u0091high\u00C2\u0092 art, only incidentally 97 Hansen and Porter, Physicians Art, 192. 98 Callen, Spectacular Body, 85. Figure 16. Plate 13: The surgical form of the male and female axill\u00C3\u00A6 compared. Surgical Anatomy 45 of an anatomical subject.\u00C2\u009499 An image from Surgical Anatomy is included in one book on the artist\u00C2\u0092s model as a \u00C2\u0093graphic illustration of the manner in which mid-Victorian techniques of drawing permeated into medical treatises.\u00C2\u0094100 It is the only example of a medical illustration in what is otherwise an entire book of \u00C2\u0093high art\u00C2\u0094 nudes. Scholars have also observed Maclise\u00C2\u0092s stylistic affinities to the life drawings of hyper-realist artists such as William Mulready (1786-1863).101 Maclise\u00C2\u0092s brother, Daniel Maclise, was a renowned Victorian artist and a member of the Royal Academy, which has prompted commentators to observe similarities between the brothers\u00C2\u0092 bodies of work.102 We can be reasonably safe in assuming that Maclise was aware of what was happening in fine art circles. However, we are only able to speculate on his reasons for illustrating artistically. Maclise was working in a period that witnessed, as Lynda Nead has shown, an increasingly commercial visual street culture. Nead argues that the response to new forms of visual culture in Victorian London manifested itself in nostalgia \u00C2\u0093for a slower and more containable world of high art.\u00C2\u0094103 Certainly a self-conscious nostalgia is a possible explanation for Maclise\u00C2\u0092s decision to invoke neoclassical conventions of high art, as his prefatory comments on his \u00C2\u0093retrospective\u00C2\u0094 orientation make clear. Perhaps he wished to emulate the artistry of his anatomical \u00C2\u0093heroes,\u00C2\u0094 men like William Hunter. As well, Maclise\u00C2\u0092s artistry can be seen as an effort to resuscitate interest in the \u00C2\u0093unalterable 99 Roberts, Maps of the Body, 101; Roberts and Tomlinson, Fabric of the Body, 562. 100 Martin Postle and William Vaughan, The Artist\u00C2\u0092s Model: From Etty to Spencer (London: Merrell Holberton, 1999), 26. 101 Ibid. 102 Nancy Weston, Daniel Maclise: Irish Artist in Victorian London (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2001), 229. Weston also, rather romantically, observes that \u00C2\u0093the similarities are so strong that it is impossible not to imagine a lifetime o f these brothers drawing side by side with the only line blurred being that between the poet and the practitioner.\u00C2\u0094 For more information, see Arts Council of Great Britain, Daniel Maclise, 1806-1870 (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1972). 103 Nead, Victorian Babylon, 145-151. 46 facts of the human body\u00C2\u0094 with his \u00C2\u0093novel treatment\u00C2\u0094 of them using anatomical artistry.104 Certainly his contemporaries had virtually ceased to produce anatomies in this style and his was distinctive for its artistry. Another possible explanation for Maclise\u00C2\u0092s artistry is the belief, mentioned above, that high art minimized potential sexual readings of the nude by elevating it from \u00C2\u0093naked\u00C2\u0094 male body to artistic \u00C2\u0093nude.\u00C2\u0094 Debates supporting these distinctions seem to have originated in controversies surrounding the interactions between artists and nude models. The rhetoric of high art\u00C2\u0092s elevating capacities was first invoked when, in the early- nineteenth century, artistic academies in England became contentious spaces that included both women and men.105 These heated debates about the role of the nude were taking place during Maclise\u00C2\u0092s formative years as an artist, and were only a generation before he began to publish his own works. The formal conventions of high art were supposed to work to de-eroticise the naked body and encouraged \u00C2\u0093an elevated mental set in the viewer who might otherwise be susceptible to baser promptings.\u00C2\u0094106 This prescriptive language of elevation and de-eroticisation obscures the reality of the life drawing class. Despite elevating rhetoric, concerns over the proximity of artists and naked models\u00C2\u0097and the potential for sexual arousal and contact enabled by this proximity\u00C2\u0097abounded.107 The nude tradition in England faced opposition from critics 104 Maclise, Surgical Anatomy, viii. 105 Alison Smith, The Victorian Nude: Sexuality, Morality, and Art (Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press, 1996), 25; Postle and Vaughan, Artist\u00C2\u0092s Model, 110. 106 Roger Benjamin, \u00C2\u0093Expression, Disfiguration: Matisse, the Female Nude and the Academic Eye,\u00C2\u0094 in In Visible Touch: Modernism and Masculinity, ed. Terry Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 76. 107 Postle and Vaughan, Artist\u00C2\u0092s Model, 56. 47 who claimed to be defending public morality.108 For these opponents, nakedness, \u00C2\u0093whether male, female, realistic, eroticised or ideal,\u00C2\u0094 had no place in art.109 Even reputable, established artists faced criticism for their portrayals of nudes. The English artist William Etty (1787-1849), a member of the Royal Academy, was famous for his nude paintings. In the 1820s, the Times criticized his work as being indecent: \u00C2\u0093naked figures, when painted with the purity of Raphael, may be endured: but nakedness without purity is offensive and indecent, and in Mr. Etty\u00C2\u0092s canvass is mere dirty flesh.\u00C2\u0094110 The critic couches his indictment of Etty\u00C2\u0092s work in the unspecific language of a concern for purity. What he seems to be suggesting, however, is that Etty\u00C2\u0092s portrayal of the naked body is too realistic. Its lack of elevation makes it problematic. Without \u00C2\u0093purity,\u00C2\u0094 the images were too realistic, too base, and too visceral. Although Etty was undoubtedly a \u00C2\u0093serious\u00C2\u0094 high-art painter\u00C2\u0097wide acclaim for his talent and his membership in the Royal Academy attest to this\u00C2\u0097even he was unable to escape the condemnation of being base and \u00C2\u0093dirty.\u00C2\u0094 Indeed, Etty contended with accusations of salaciousness for his entire career.111 In addition to numerous female nudes, Etty also produced art of the male body. These nudes, however, failed to receive similar accusations of \u00C2\u0093dirty flesh\u00C2\u0094 despite strong erotic associations. The lack of criticism of male nudes by male artists indicates a normalization of male-male relationships in the tradition of the academic male nude. Artists portrayed nude men as heroic and masculine and as exemplars of a certain brand of athletic masculinity, despite the fact that models were largely drawn from the working 108 Alison Smith, ed. Exposed: The Victorian Nude (London: Tate Publishing, 2001), 11. 109 Postle and Vaughan, Artist\u00C2\u0092s Model, 109. 110 Ibid., 110. 111 Smith, Exposed, 31. 48 classes. Male models were culled from the ranks of \u00C2\u0093pugilists or soldiers capable of sustaining a pose and renowned for their fine musculature.\u00C2\u0094 They were selected for their physical similarity to the perfect antique body and were represented in these lofty terms.112 Thus, in art as in Maclise\u00C2\u0092s own images, the lower class status of the actual model was effaced in the images. Interestingly, images of pugilists and pedestrians (runners) were also in circulation in the common market. They could be bought in London in the early 1860s for five shillings each, echoing the ways that Maclise\u00C2\u0092s images were also produced in both elitist and popular versions, with appropriate prices.113 While five shillings was certainly still expensive, it was drastically less expensive than most pornography. Pornographic images in weekly publications such as The Exquisite were more accessibly priced. The Exquisite was published between 1842 and 1844 by William Dugdale, and provided stories of copulation and seduction focussing on heterosexual penile-vaginal intercourse with one pornographic engraving per issue. Each issue with a colour engraving, at one shilling, six pence, was affordable for the more well-off labouring classes.114 The prices of these consumer products suggest a thriving market for images of nude men, among the labour elite and the middle classes. Images of pugilists and pedestrians, like those of male anatomical models, could be read \u00C2\u0093straight,\u00C2\u0094 simply for their intended meanings. But the possibility that they carried sexual subtexts meant they could also be \u00C2\u0093read\u00C2\u0094 differently, as ostensibly licit but sexually provocative. 112 Ibid., 61. 113 Era (London), January 19, 1862, 3. 114 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, 56. 49 While Etty\u00C2\u0092s paintings of male nudes are not manifestly homoerotic, they border on these traditions in their sensuality and depiction of male physicality. Several of Etty\u00C2\u0092s works show an interest in \u00C2\u0093both exotic men and naked men.\u00C2\u0094115 The painting here, The Wrestlers, exemplifies Etty\u00C2\u0092s interest in the physicality of the male body (figure 17). Drawing a stark visual contrast between dark and light flesh, Etty\u00C2\u0092s painting shows the two wrestlers in an unclothed embrace, their arms and legs closely intertwined. The formal conventions contrasting lightness and darkness highlight the locations of contact, drawing the eye to the boundaries between light and dark flesh where the flesh is pressed together. Although they are looking away from each other, they remain in close contact and their muscularity and strength is manifest in the painting. These models are images of masculine perfection and were \u00C2\u0093celebrations of virile masculinity.\u00C2\u0094116 Etty\u00C2\u0092s choice of male models had erotic connotations as well. He, like other artists, preferred muscular guardsmen. Two such men, Guardsman Higgins and Samuel Strowger, appeared numerous times in his art (figure 18).117 115 Robert Aldrich, Colonialism and Homosexuality (London and New York: Routledge, 2003), 150. 116 Smith, Exposed, 61. 117 Ibid., 61. Figure 17. The Wrestlers, William Etty. ca. 1840 50 The guardsmen and soldiers were part of a highly homosocial environment. Scholars have observed that guardsmen frequently engaged in male prostitution because of the army\u00C2\u0092s low pay.118 One notorious site for male \u00C2\u0093renting\u00C2\u0094 was in Trafalgar Square where a nearby barracks ensured a constant supply of \u00C2\u0093soldiers willing to accept all kinds of invitations.\u00C2\u0094 In November 1842, male prostitution by guardsmen incited a public controversy when the Times reported that a private in the Grenadier Guards, William Malt, was arrested for \u00C2\u0093unspecified \u00C2\u0091indecent practices\u00C2\u0092 committed in the toilet with a civilian.\u00C2\u0094119 In light of these accusations, guardsmen shown in Etty\u00C2\u0092s paintings took on new associations and prompted viewers to look suspiciously, or knowingly, at the figures. Giving viewers cause to believe that nude male models might also be male prostitutes\u00C2\u0097however remote a possibility\u00C2\u0097provided a powerful link between \u00C2\u0093perverse\u00C2\u0094 sexuality and high art. More explicit connections were drawn between illicit sexuality and art through the 1850s. Anxieties around the artistic nude intensified, particularly in the lead-up to the 118 Theo Aronson, Prince Eddy and the Homosexual Underworld (London: John Murray, 1994), 25. 119 Matt Cook, ed., A Gay History of Britain: Love and Sex between Men Since the Middle Ages (Oxford: Greenwood World, 2007), 117. Figure 18. Guardsman Higgins, William Etty 51 passing of the Obscene Publications Act of 1857. Private art collectors worried that their nude paintings would be seized as pornography and that they might face prosecution.120 Ultimately the Obscene Publications Act determined that potentially obscene images of nudity were safe if they were \u00C2\u0093artistic.\u00C2\u0094121 There was, however, a fine and unstable line between art and obscenity. Photographs of nude models that were used by artists as visual aids came under attack and were classed as pornography. In 1870, one seller of such photographs, Henry Evans, was \u00C2\u0093charged with selling obscene prints, and fined and sentenced to two years\u00C2\u0092 hard labour despite a petition in his favour signed by artists who used his supplies, including [Dante Gabriel] Rossetti and [Edward] Burne-Jones.\u00C2\u0094122 What constituted \u00C2\u0093art\u00C2\u0094 and what \u00C2\u0093pornography\u00C2\u0094 was being actively defined; even artistic aids were not sufficiently elevated to avoid prosecution. In fact, by the turn of the twentieth century, pornographers euphemistically marketed pornographic nudes as \u00C2\u0093artist\u00C2\u0092s models.\u00C2\u0094123 That these images were classed, sold, and used as pornography but were named as \u00C2\u0093art\u00C2\u0094 demonstrates the problematic slippage between art and pornography. Photographic studies of the male nude existed in the 1850s as well. The photographs taken by the French photographer Eug\u00C3\u00A8n\u00C3\u00A8 Durieu as studies for the painter Eug\u00C3\u00A8n\u00C3\u00A8 Delacroix have been identified as some of the earliest sets of 120 Nead, Female Nude, 89. 121 Postle and Vaughan, Artist\u00C2\u0092s Model, 113. 122 Ibid. 123 Sigel, Governing Pleasures, 90. 52 male nude photography and have been identified by some commentators as homoerotic (figure 19).124 124 Ellenzweig, Homoerotic Photograph, 7. 53 Durieu\u00E2\u0080\u0099s model displays rippling abdominal muscles and he is positioned holding the pole in such a way as to best display the definition of the torso. Like Durieu\u00E2\u0080\u0099s images, Maclise\u00E2\u0080\u0099s models are also positioned to best display the musculature of the body. Durieu\u00E2\u0080\u0099s figure\u00E2\u0080\u0099s eyes are cast downwards and aside and his face is neutral, in much the same way as many of Maclise\u00E2\u0080\u0099s figures\u00E2\u0080\u0099 faces (figure 20). The appearance of Maclise\u00E2\u0080\u0099s and Durieu/Delacroix\u00E2\u0080\u0099s figures\u00E2\u0080\u0099 bodies are also similar: broad shoulders, expansive chests, muscular arms and a general impression of firmness of flesh characterize both artists\u00E2\u0080\u0099 works. This firmness, in a homoerotic reading, symbolizes the phallus in embodying \u00E2\u0080\u009Call the properties wished for in the phallus: strength, Figure 19. Male nude. Durieu, 1853 Figure 20. Plate 23: The relative position of the deeper organs of the thorax and those of the abdomen. Surgical Anatomy 54 firmness, vigour and mastery.\u00E2\u0080\u009D The stool in the background of the Durieu/Delacroix photographs is draped in fabric, mimicking the \u00E2\u0080\u009Csweep of folded drapery\u00E2\u0080\u009D that was a convention of the academic nude study and also appears in Maclise\u00E2\u0080\u0099s illustrations.125 The effect of this draping in Maclise\u00E2\u0080\u0099s work is to foreground the dissected anatomy and, perhaps, to preserve some semblance of modesty for the model and to prevent offending viewers. As well, drawing drapery was a sign of artistic skill. Fabric was notoriously difficult to draw well, and conveying its thinness and the body beneath it was a challenge for artists. Perhaps Maclise was demonstrating his technical skill as an artist, not merely an anatomist. In practice, however, the draping does nothing to protect the figure\u00E2\u0080\u0099s modesty or to shield potentially offended viewers. In plate 51, the futility of the drapery is even more pronounced as the viewer, as well as the anatomist, is privileged with an invasive and intimate view of the subject\u00E2\u0080\u0099s genitals (figure 21). 125 Ibid., 14, 7. 55 These attempts to integrate the conventions of high art into anatomical illustration reflect, perhaps, an impulse to elevate it as artistic, just as the veil of antiquity was used to de- eroticise the nude; however, when the reader is invited to imagine the intimate circumstances of the subject and anatomist\u00C2\u0097such as Maclise drawing the illustration above, positioned between the cadaver\u00C2\u0092s legs\u00C2\u0097that veil of elevation evaporates. Anatomy was a physical and messy profession. Anatomists were not elevated above the body; they were in it, using tools and instruments to cut it apart. Artistry was a problematic representational mode, but realism offered no reprieve from accusations of sensuality either. The problematic realism of photographic nude studies (since they were studio portraits as yet unelevated by the artist) and Etty\u00C2\u0092s works demonstrate this. Maclise had to make the \u00C2\u0093dissected dead counterfeit\u00C2\u0094 appear life-like and realistic in order to have relevance to the \u00C2\u0093whole living body\u00C2\u0094 that surgeons operated Figure 21. Plate 51: The surgical dissection of the superficial structures of the male perin\u00C3\u00A6um. Surgical Anatomy 56 on.126 Realism, according to Maclise, was what gave anatomy instructional value. Realism was also, however, problematic since it evoked the body as a sexually accessible, base and material human body. Since artistic rhetoric of transcendence and elevation and realism were equally bankrupt, the anatomical profession faced a representational dead end. After Maclise, anxieties about medicine and sexuality would continue to intensify but would be voiced in a new location: sensationalized representations of medical seductions in the popular press. In one article, an account of a paternity suit, a Dr. Waters is accused of drugging a patient, Mary Walley and having sex with her while she was unconscious, resulting in a pregnancy. The article reports: \u00C2\u0093then came the 9th of November, on which day Mary Walley swore that she called upon the doctor, that she was very ill when she arrived there, that the doctor gave her some wine, and that she almost immediately afterwards had a fit and became insensible, and that she remembered nothing more until she came to herself about two hours after, when she found herself lying on the hearthrug in another room.\u00C2\u0094127 Dr. Waters\u00C2\u0092s profession was construed as providing the forum and means for the alleged seduction. The reportage of medical seduction was increasingly common in the second half of the nineteenth century, and perhaps reached its apex with the \u00C2\u0093Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon\u00C2\u0094 series that ran in the Pall Mall Gazette in 1885. In the \u00C2\u0093Maiden Tribute,\u00C2\u0094 the editor and social-crusader W.T. Stead sought to expose a wicked circuit of exploitative doctors and midwives who conducted gynaecological examinations on girls of \u00C2\u0093a tender age\u00C2\u0094 to medically certify 126 Maclise, Surgical Anatomy, viii. 127 \u00C2\u0093A Medical Man Accused of Seduction,\u00C2\u0094 Reynolds\u00C2\u0092s Newspaper (London), April 12, 1863. 57 their virginity for sale into child prostitution.128 The public was outraged to hear that medical persons were participating in the corruption of young girls. Stories like these demonstrate the intensification of public anxieties around medicine and sexuality in the decades following Maclise. They make it clear that the public was growing increasingly intolerant of any ambiguity surrounding sexualized representations of patients. But they also demonstrate that anatomy ceased to be the focus of this scrutiny. Artistic anatomical illustration, by virtue of the sexual baggage of its tradition, had been discredited and discarded. The introduction of the diagrammatic style had thus solved one set of these problems by distancing anatomy from representational traditions with erotic associations and minimizing the public\u00C2\u0092s anxiety about the anatomical enterprise. It also, however, opened another set of problems; for example, this new abstract anatomical body was curiously \u00C2\u0093unbodily\u00C2\u0094 and it made claims of unbiased legibility and transparency that commentators have recently begun to argue are unjustified.129 In these ways, and others, representational problems continued to plague the field of anatomy. 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Nature\u00C2\u0092s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Sigel, Lisa Z. Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815- 1914. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002. "@en . "Thesis/Dissertation"@en . "2008-11"@en . "10.14288/1.0066432"@en . "eng"@en . "History"@en . "Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library"@en . "University of British Columbia"@en . "Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International"@en . "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/"@en . "Graduate"@en . "Dissecting the erotic : art and sexuality in mid-Victorian medical anatomy"@en . "Text"@en . "http://hdl.handle.net/2429/930"@en .