An outline of the history of art in its relation to medical science : being the substance of an introductory address delivered at the Medical and Physical Society of St. Thomas's Hospital, October, 1885 / by William Anderson.

  • Anderson, William, 1842-1900.
Date:
[1887?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: An outline of the history of art in its relation to medical science : being the substance of an introductory address delivered at the Medical and Physical Society of St. Thomas's Hospital, October, 1885 / by William Anderson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    and remedy the symptoms of disease, but we must be satisfied to tell by centuries, and upon the fingers of one hand, the term of existence of accurate pictorial or toreutic illustration of even the most rudimentary facts of human anatomy, so far as these facts concerned the study of medicine. The evidence as to the utilisation of art by the physician during the historical periods anterior to the fourteenth century is almost entirely negative. There is little or nothing to indicate that the ancient teachers were accustomed to assist the exposition of their doctrines by drawings and models, for no such aids to description are alluded to in the writings of Hippocrates or Galen, or in any of the early medical authors (unless the doubtful passages quoted by Hoffmann and Schultze from the ' Historia Animalium' of Aristotle be accepted as testimony that anatomical figures were employed for the purpose of instruction by the Stagirite), and there is little doubt that had there been anything of the kind worthy of preservation some record of the fact would have been handed down by the almost unbroken succession of ardent disciples who treated as products of divine inspira- tion every relic and tradition of the great fathers of medicine. The existence, however, of a certain indirect contact between art and medical science may be admitted. Caricatures of surgical deformity are perhaps as old as caricature itself : the wen, the blind eye, the crooked back, appear in drawings of very early date; and the first wart that grew upon the nose of man may well have proved an irresistible temptation to any juvenile draughtsman of the period who felt com- petent to register his impression of the phenomenon in chalk upon the walls of Memphis or Luxor; but in cases such as these, however strongly the artist may have chosen to accentuate the morbid at the expense of the normal, his design is no more to be received as a tribute to pathology than is the phallic imagery of prehistoric races to be classed with modern illustrations of anatomical or physiological research. If we carry back the inquiry to the most remote civilisations, as of Egypt, India, Grreece, and China, we find the study of medi- cine held everywhere in great honour, and in some of these coun- tries art, particularly in its toreutic branches, rising to a very