On several occasions I have talked about children's illustrations, and I love the way in which the authors complement a text to get the attention of the little ones, and of the elders. In this case it is not about children's drawings but about old illustrations about pregnancy that we can consult after the digitization of different works.
It is a project of the National Library of Medicine that brings together ancient works of anatomy, and among them we find curious samples of how pregnancy and the fetus looked then and was reflected in specialized works.
How the authors achieved that relative realism is no secret: using real bodies of pregnant women, some with permission and others, they say, achieved not with very good arts. Luckily, everything is no longer valid in the name of science ...
The "Historical Anatomies on the Web" project is responsible for scanning and disseminating important treaties, from all eras, related to the study of human anatomy, and focuses mainly on the processing of images, illustrations, rather than the accompanying texts
A broad and interesting corpus for the history of medicine and culture in general. Some of the titles that we can see and that show us pregnancy anatomy illustrations They are:
"Foetu liber singularis" (1626) by the authors Giulio Cesare Casseri and Adriaan van de Spiegel, with illustrations by Odoardo Fialetti (1573-1638), Italian painter and engraver.
"Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata", "The anatomy of the gravid human uterus exposed in figures", (by John Baskerville, 1774), illustrated by William Hunter.
A sett of anatomical tables, with explanations, and an abridgment, of the practice of midwifery (on the practice of midwifery, that is, a manual for midwives and midwives), with illustrations by William Smellie.
- In this anonymous Persian anatomy book we find the illustration we see on these lines, of a pregnant woman in which the baby is a "miniature adult", with adult features and, yes, with a tiny head. Surely whoever drew this picture had not given birth to a baby ...
Some of the images are quite macabre, with cut legs included in full detail, but another is more funny, such as those that "open" the gut of the woman in the form of a flower. More or less realistic, I'm interested in everything that has to do with how medicine was studied and transmitted before, as with those pregnant dolls we talked about.
In short, thanks to this interesting project we can walk through the illustrations that show how pregnancy was represented and seen centuries ago, in different eras and cultures.
