Paper short abstract:

Drawing on medical anthropology and anthropological studies of material and visual culture, this paper analyses collaborations, in Scotland, between anatomists and artists from 1920 to the present. It considers how these collaborations have developed as medical explorations in a range of materials.

Paper long abstract:

Drawing on medical anthropology and anthropological studies of material and visual culture, this paper analyses practices in medical schools involving anatomists and artists. It focuses on collaborations between these practitioners in Scotland from c.1920 to the present, a period when historians of science have suggested there was a shift toward greater scope for openly imaginative involvement in empirically based scientific work.

At the University of Aberdeen three generations of anatomists collaborated with artists from Gray's School of Art in the same city. They cast bodies (living and dissected) in plaster to display the nerves, around 1920; they created an illustrated textbook of human anatomy working with drawings, watercolours and photography during the 1940s; and with students at Gray's in the 1970s they designed a memorial for people who donate their bodies to medical science. In the present-day context, contemporary works of art are exhibited at Aberdeen's medical school where, in the public entrance, artists' installations are viewed alongside anatomical models.

The paper asks how anatomist/artist collaborations have developed as medical explorations in materials from plaster and paint to mixed-media. How have the material processes and products involved in such alliances shaped the teaching and display of anatomy? In what ways have these collaborative practices, and the relationships they entail, changed over time? How have perceptions of art and medicine been formed through these ways of working? How is art used to help form the current public face of anatomy and the medical profession?