The U.S. National Library of Medicine – that’s a division of the National Institutes of Health, for those keeping track of tax-dollar expenditures – is showcasing this collection of beautiful, often fantastical drawings of the human body, most of which date from the first few centuries after the dawn of the printing press. Between 1680 and 1800 there was a drive among anatomists to make anatomy illustrations more faithful to science (no small issue in the era before X-rays and the Visible Human Project); the variety of responses to this push are gorgeous, bizarre, sometimes creepy and uniformly worth your time. (From USAToday)

The interior of our bodies is hidden to us. What happens beneath the skin is mysterious, fearful, amazing. 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.

Over the centuries anatomy has become a visual vocabulary of realism. We regard the anatomical body as our inner reality, a medium through which we imagine society, culture and the human condition.

Drawn mainly from the collections of the National Library of Medicine, Dream Anatomy shows off the anatomical imagination in some of its most astonishing incarnations, from 1500 to the present.

Visit Dream Anatomy Official Website

Book Description:

170 photos and illustrations Insightful descriptive text Informative description of the print technologies of anatomical illustration History of anatomy timeline Full exhibition checklist Exhibition credits.

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