Elizabeth Stephens, Anatomy as Spectacle: Public Exhibitions of the Body from 1700 to the Present

According to Guy Debord's 1967 manifesto, The Society of the Spectacle: ‘The spectacle is a social relation between people that is mediated by images. … [R]eal life is materially invaded by the contemplation of the spectacle, and ends up absorbing it and aligning itself with it’.¹ The spectacle produces its spectators, who end up contributing to it, become a part of it, even as it becomes part of them.

In Anatomy as Spectacle, Elizabeth Stephens considers the history of public anatomical displays. When I began working on this topic some 20 years ago, the historical literature was sparse. Since then scholars have produced studies of early modern anatomical theatres and collections, anatomical wax models and moulages, anatomical postcards and yearbook photos, popular anatomical exhibitions and contemporary anatomical art. Their work has drawn on, and contributed to, the history of medicine, death, health reform, advertising, class, race and gender—and the theory and practice of spectacular productions like dioramas, circuses, dime museums, motion pictures, shop windows, world's fairs. We know much more now than we knew then and use more sophisticated theoretical instruments derived from Walter Benjamin, Foucault, Habermas, Latour, de Certeau, Butler, Lefebvre, Galison and Daston, Barbara Maria Stafford, and so on.

Stephens invokes and alludes to some of this scholarship in her slender volume of interlinked essays. Her itinerary, roughly chronological, starts with ‘The Docile Subject of Anatomy: Gynomorphic Waxworks in 18th- and 19th-Century Public Exhibitions’, continues with ‘Lost Manhood: Turn-of-the-Century Museums of Anatomy and the Spermatorrhoea Epidemic’, and closes with chapters on the current reinvention of freakery (interesting but off-topic) and the current reinvention of the anatomical museum. The best part, for me, is Stephens's lively account of the legal troubles and wanderings of the Kahns and Jordans, nineteenth-century museum proprietors who, under attack by the medical profession and police, turned up in England, America and Australia, and who may have operated under assumed identities, as a Jordan or Kahn or someone else.

Stephens begins by positing that ‘self-discipline and self-scrutiny’ were ‘crucial to the development of the responsible and respectable bourgeois self’; and that ‘19th-century museums provided an important site of reinforcement for … such practices’ (p. 11). In the 1830s and 1840s, middle-class reformers began preaching that schoolchildren, women, labourers, and even ‘savages’, could benefit from instruction in anatomy: such knowledge, they argued, was an indispensable part of the civilizing process. This larger movement should be a key element in the analysis, but Stephens glosses over it and goes directly to spectacle, which had an ambivalently unstable relation to ‘polite’ anatomy. The result is a circular and, to my way of thinking, miscast, argument: entertainments made anatomy respectable; anatomy made entertainments respectable. Taking off from Ruth Richardson's and Helen Macdonald's work on popular resistance to bodysnatching, burking and anatomical mutilation of the dead, Stephens assumes that the legitimacy of anatomy was not secured until the 1830s. But Vesalius and his early modern successors achieved great legitimacy, and courses in anatomy proliferated, as did fancy illustrated atlases. Bodysnatching and anatomical desecration of human remains, as far back as the sixteenth century, inspired resentment, but never cast into doubt (and even contributed to) the high epistemic claims of anatomy as a science. Later anatomical exhibitions traded on the anatomical mystique and cited the originary and transgressive acts of bodysnatching, dissection and display of the dead.

That aside, Stephens's larger argument fits comfortably within the Foucauldian paradigm: anatomical displays—specimens floating in jars, dry specimens posed on pedestals, and models in wax and papier-maché—were constitutive, instated medical science as an authority over the body. Anatomy fostered a sense of physiological interiority: it inscribed boundaries, Greek-derived place-names, and hygienic regimes inside the body, marked the difference between the living and the dead, human/animal, male/female, white/non-white, normal/pathological and enforced a kind of discursive discipline.

As anatomy was incorporated into the curriculum of bourgeois self-making, anatomical spectacle came to be used as a technology of mobilisation, a marketing device. Museums of anatomy—often ‘for gentleman only’ and located in fairgrounds and red-light districts where men could purchase the services of prostitutes and see erotic performances—presented displays of diseased genitals and lectures on gonorrhoea and syphilis, but also ‘spermatorrhoea’ (masturbation, nocturnal emissions, involuntary discharges) which was said to sap a man's vitality, ruin his health and lead to ‘lost manhood’ (sexual impotence). Stephens nicely highlights the incitement of anxiety and crisis of masculinity—the shame—which spermatorrhoea-talk precipitated, and which turned men into easy marks for ‘anatomical lecturers’ peddling treatments.

Those afflicted by venereal diseases were often enough desperate for a cure—and desperate to avoid becoming themselves a spectacle. Stephens's analysis of this gaze reversal works beautifully but loses sight of the complexity of spectatorial practice: shame was not the only response. Anatomy could be mobilised as a travesty of polite body-discipline. Spectators were perversely entertained, even to the point of laughter, by views of genital chancres and syphilitic lesions—perhaps even took those painful markers as badges of sexual conquest. There was a libidinal economy of arousal and shame, pleasure and punishment. The fearful lecture and displays, the medical examination and purchase of salves and tonics, were all part of a nightmare eroticism that heightened the sense of danger and thrills of adventuring. The spermatorrhoea diagnosis enlarged the market to include those whose sexual adventuring was limited to masturbation.

Proprietors' claims that they presented their exhibits with ‘delicacy’ and ‘refinement’ were sometimes made in good faith, but, more often, such rhetoric (occasionally accompanied by a policy of opening displays ‘to ladies’ one afternoon a week) was a gesture that disavowed the homosociality and pleasures of anatomical spectacle: visiting a museum was, like visiting a prostitute, something disreputable that men shared among themselves. It was thus a target for police agencies which labelled them ‘obscene’. The spectator was never a ‘docile subject’, but complicit.

Anatomy as Spectacle is a good introduction to anatomical exhibitionism in the Foucauldian genealogical mode: ‘such exhibitions have trained us to see work on the body as … a personal responsibility and a privileged path to self-realisation’ (p. 22). But there is a curious lacuna: ‘spectacle’, ‘spectator’ and ‘the gaze’ go untheorised and unhistoricised, and become elastic and ultimately tautological—anatomical spectacles ‘spectacularise’. At the same time, Stephens's evident pleasure in discussing her anatomical shows unintentionally inflates their importance. In ‘modern society’ Debord reminds us, ‘life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles’: any one spectacle will tend to have a vanishingly small impact on thrill-seeking spectators, who move quickly from one spectacle to the next.²

1

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle (English translation, London: Rebel Press, 1983) 7–8.

2

Ibid., 6.