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NEWS: Wendy Moore Exhibition hopes to give Gray’s Anatomy artist his proper due BMJ 2008; 336: 688-a-689-a [Full text]

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Art and Anatomy

Anibal J. Morillo   (29 March 2008)

Art and Anatomy 29 March 2008
Anibal J. Morillo, Academic Coordinator, Postgraduate Program in Radiology Department of Diagnostic Imaging, University Hospital of the Fundación Santa Fe de Bogotá, Colombia Send response to journal: Re: Art and Anatomy	For years, I have been interested in the relationship between art, anatomy and radiology. When the Arts Department of the Andes University in Bogotá, Colombia, asked me for a lecture on anatomy for artists, it was a dream come true. Gray and his illustrator are only one example of the associations between anatomists and artists, one of the first and most reknowned being the collaboration of Vesalius and van Kalkar. Eustachi, Estienne, Albinus, Casserius, Spieghel, Bidloo, Willis and many other anatomists base their fame on artists whose drawings and engravings were mostly anonymous or poorly credited. The Hunterian contributions to anatomy, masterfully narrated by Wendy Moore, were beautifully illustrated by Jan van Rymsdyk. Jan Wandelaar is not a name commonly associated to anatomy, even though his illustrations are amongst the most beautifully achieved in the history of anatomical art. His work is best known by the textbook he illustrated (and illuminated), the one authored by Albinus. Indeed, the anatomists played a definitive role in guiding the accuracy of the drawings, but clearly, the illustrations are the highlights of most of the older anatomical textbooks, in a time when the scientific knowledge of anatomy was still precarious and even based on dogmatic precedents that preached mammalian anatomy as the reference for human anatomy. Competing interests: None declared