Modelling the Human – Modelling Society Anatomical Models in Early Twentieth-Century Vienna and the Politics of Visual Cultures

Abstract

This paper aims at investigating anatomical modelling as a cultural practice. In early twentieth-century Vienna anatomists and artists produced a variety of models of the human body that had different functions, uses and meanings in changing historical scientific, political and cultural contexts. Together with various media of anatomical visualization such as atlases, medical moulages, illustrations and films they competed, both in the academic spheres of medical and art schools as well as in several places of popular negotiation and production of visual cultures of medicine, such as museums or public health education. Anatomical models, as this paper shows, are not only artefacts of medical-anatomical production of knowledge, meaning and evidence but highly powerful and strategic objects of knowledge linked to specific urban and political milieus and networks.

Keywords

• anatomy
• modelling
• politics
• Vienna
• interwar period
• epistemic virtues