U.S. National Library of Medicine

09 December 2004 - 23:51 Filed in: General
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Drawn mainly from the collections of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, Dream Anatomy shows off the anatomical imagination in some of its most astonishing incarnations, from 1500 to the present:

In antiquity, the body's internal structure was the subject of speculation, fantasy, and some study, but there were few efforts to represent it in pictures. The invention of the printing press in the 15th century-and the cascade of print technologies that followed-helped to inspire a new spectacular science of anatomy, and new spectacular visions of the body. Anatomical imagery proliferated, detailed and informative but also whimsical, surreal, beautiful, and grotesque — a dream anatomy that reveals as much about the outer world as it does the inner self.
Fritz Kahn (1888-1968): Der Mensch als Industriepalast (Man as Industrial Palace), Stuttgart, 1926. Chromolithograph, U.S. National Library of Medicine.
Kahn’s modernist visualization of the digestive and respiratory system as "industrial palace," really a chemical plant, was conceived in a period when the German chemical industry was the world’s most advanced.