Hubert Steinke

Parochialism or Self-Consciousness? Internationality in Medical History Journals 1997–2006

Research councils, universities and funding agencies are increasingly asking for tools to measure the quality of research in the humanities. One of their preferred methods is a ranking of journals according to their supposed level of internationality. Our quantitative survey of seventeen major journals of medical history reveals the futility of such an approach. Most journals have a strong national character with a dominance of native language, authors and topics. The most common case is a paper written by a local author in his own language on a national subject regarding the nineteenth or twentieth century. American and British journals are taken notice of internationally but they only rarely mention articles from other history of medicine journals. Continental European journals show a more international review of literature, but are in their turn not noticed globally. Increasing specialisation and fragmentation has changed the role of general medical history journals. They run the risk of losing their function as international platforms of discourse on general and theoretical issues and major trends in historiography, to international collections of papers. Journal editors should therefore force their authors to write a more international report, and authors should be encouraged to submit papers of international interest and from a more general, transnational and methodological point of view.

Andrew Cunningham, The Anatomist Anatomis’d: An Experimental Discipline in Enlightenment Europe , The History of Medicine in Context (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), pp. + xxiv + 442, £65.00, hardback, ISBN: 978-0-7546-6338-6.

Anatomy for centuries has been a if not the central discipline of medicine. Unsurprisingly, it has thus also been a key topic of medical historiography. But when we have to recommend some few modern general books to non-specialists and students, there is only a small number to choose from. With regard to the Renaissance, my choice would be Andrew Cunningham’s monograph from 1997. But what about the following ‘long’ eighteenth century (1650–1800)? Up to now, there was hardly a book that could claim to cover this period in a substantial and general manner reflecting actual scholarly interests. Cunningham now has published a volume on this period hoping ‘that one day this book might actually be read by students’ (p. xxii). Are his hopes justified? As the author stresses, this book is not primarily concerned with the history of the body, nor with anatomical discoveries or the relationship between anatomy and art. It is about the discipline of anatomy, about the elements and especially the various forms of practice that constituted this discipline. It thus reflects current approaches in the history of science and science studies to describe scientific disciplines and identities as a set of shared practices and beliefs. Cunningham’s approach is not fundamentally new; it is, however, new in its wide-ranging application to eighteenth-century anatomy. Chapters One, Two and Four offer a wealth of information on practical matters such as anatomical theatres, careers and courses, acquisition and preservation of bodies, methods of producing illustrations, various topics of controversy, etc. Many of the sources are, quite understandably, well known and the account, therefore, rarely offers unexpected interpretations. Given the vast range of topics it necessarily remains often on a rather descriptive level. Its merit lies in its sensible arrangement and the pan-European view that takes into account the conditions mainly in Great Britain, France, the German-speaking countries, Italy and the Netherlands. Cunningham’s overview shows many similarities but also differences in anatomical practice: some careers depended partly on dynasty, some entirely on merit; some courses were held in a very traditional style, some in a Vesalian or other manner; at some places there was an abundance of bodies, at others there was evident shortage, etc. These similarities and differences neither prevented nor sufficiently secured the establishment of anatomy as a single discipline. What, then, constituted the core of the discipline of ‘old anatomy’ (as Cunningham calls it)? The answer is given in the subtitle and the third and fifth chapters of the book: the notion of anatomy as an experimental discipline with various sub-disciplines. This is the main, novel and important argument of the book (partly already published in an article in 2002–3). Cunningham quite convincingly shows that our modern conceptions of anatomy and physiology have led us to regard every case of vivisection as an early instance of experimental physiology, where in fact they belonged to anatomy which was an experimental and far richer discipline in the early modern period than today. All the experiments undertaken were anatomical because they started from anatomical structures and properties instead of physiological questions. The scholars consistently called them ‘anatomical experiments’ and considered them as part of their anatomical investigations. ‘There was no such enterprise or discipline or activity as experimental physiology. It did not yet exist. It was created only in the years just after 1800’ (p. 155). Physiology was not an experimental but a purely theoretical discipline; anatomy delivered the facts, and physiology the interpretation. In a similar manner, generation, pathology and comparative anatomy have to be considered as sub-disciplines of anatomy as their modes of investigation were anatomical: Morgagni’s great work, for instance, was based on anatomical facts, not clinical signs. All these sub-disciplines were only transformed into new single disciplines at the end of the eighteenth century. In my view, Cunningham’s argument is essentially right and a major contribution to our understanding of the history of anatomy. His broad coverage of time and topics and his emphasis on tradition and the ‘seismic series of events’ (p. xxi) in revolutionary France has, however, led him to underrate the diversity and dynamic of the second half of the eighteenth century. The terms ‘physiological experiments’ and ‘experimental physiology’ were not first used in the early nineteenth century, as he argues, but well before that (for example, in Tissot’s 1755 preface to Haller’s treatise on irritability; the Lettre sur un cours de physiologie experimentale, mentioned p. 164, was in fact published in 1771). Haller performed various experiments that were clearly physiological in their design, and he considered physiology not as a purely theoretical discipline. This critique does not, however, diminish the importance of Cunningham’s argument that seems to hold true for the majority of anatomists and physiologists. I hope and am quite confident that the author’s wishes will come true and that this book will be read by students (and scholars alike). It is the best general book on eighteenth-century anatomy we have. It is very well researched, truly informative, brilliantly argued and, last but not least, highly readable.