*This blog was originally published on The ARTECHNE Project Blog on 9 March 2017*

A travel grant from the Wood Institute at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia recently allowed me to do research in their library and archives. Established in 1786, the College holds a wonderful collection of manuscripts and printed works. As I am particularly interested in the transmission of art technical knowledge in the long eighteenth century between medical men and people we would now describe as artists or craftsmen, I started looking for connections between such people in Philadelphia. I did not have to search long, for Philadelphia in 1800 had a population of only 41,220, but it was a fast-growing trading hub with two medical colleges, and an art academy was about to be established. This meant that many Philadelphians in the middle and upper classes knew each other personally – some were even related.

Philadelphia-born William Rush had started his career as a carver of ship figureheads, learning the trade from his father and the famous Edward Cutbush. He was one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (est. 1805), and from the early nineteenth century onwards, he created a number of sculptures for public places in Philadelphia. Caspar Wistar (1761-1818), professor of chemistry and the institutes of medicine at the College of Philadelphia, was a skilled maker of anatomical preparations and models, which he created by injecting organs with wax. However, when the number of students attending his classes greatly increased in the early decades of the nineteenth century, he decided he needed something more dramatic as a teaching aid: enlarged models of human anatomy, which would be visible even at the back rows. Realizing that this surpassed his own modelling skills, he turned to Rush, who made at least twenty models for him.

As is so often the case when people are physically close, no primary written records –such as letters- remain of this collaboration between Wistar and Rush. However, their collaboration shows that there were strong connections between medical men and visual artists and craftsmen in Philadelphia around 1800. It is likely that Wistar and Rush already knew each other before they started working together. Not only was Philadelphia’s population fairly small, William Rush was a full cousin of a colleague of Wistar’s, the famous Philadelphian physician and professor of chemistry Benjamin Rush (1746-1813). Moreover, Wistar came from a family of craftspeople himself: his grandfather and namesake (1696 –1752) was a German-born

glassmaker. Both Benjamin Rush and Caspar Wistar studied in Edinburgh, and the latter corresponded with Thomas Pole, a fellow Quaker and the Philadelphia-born author of the 1790 The Anatomical Instructor, a handbook that describes, amongst others, how to make anatomical preparations and models from a variety of materials – although wood was not one of them.

So although in this case there is no evidence that Wistar taught Rush anatomy or that Rush taught Wistar practical skills for model making, it is clear that they must have been very aware of each other’s knowledge and skills, and it is rather unlikely that they never learned anything from each other. In any case, Rush successfully transmitted his technique from one discipline to another: from artistic sculpting to anatomical model making.

*This blog originally appeared on the Recipes Project on 9 March 2017*

By Marieke Hendriksen

Having written a book on eighteenth-century anatomical collections, I know a thing or two about historical techniques for preserving (parts of) the human body. As I am interested in natural history collections more generally, I also did some research on the preservation of animal bodies, and even took a taxidermy course myself. However, recently I realised that the preservation of human and animal bodies were historically even closer connected than I had imagined. Yet ideas about which parts of the human body could and should be preserved, and how, diverged greatly, particularly when it comes to skin, or taxidermy. Taxidermy, from the Greek τάξις (taxis) and  δέρμα (derma – I am adding those for people who may not read Greek script), literally means ‘the arranging of skin’.

There are a few known cases of attempts to preserve human skins in their entirety before 1800 – for example, there was a human skin in the Leiden anatomical theatre in the seventeenth century – but that wasn’t stuffed, and such attempts appear to have been altogether unsuccessful. If human skin was preserved, it was mostly small pieces, which were used to study things like skin colour and structure, tattoos, or pathologies. By the end of the eighteenth century, the preservation of an entire human skin in a lifelike pose was of little interest to anatomists. Normal internal anatomy would be studied through dissection and the creation of preparations and skeletons, and pathologies of the skin could be preserved by making preparations of small sections of skin. As healthy skin can be studied perfectly easily in live subjects, there was little reason to pursue the taxidermy of man. This is reflected in anatomical handbooks like Thomas Pole’s 1790 Anatomical Instructor (reprinted in 1813), which gave detailed directions for numerous methods to preserve parts of the human and animal body, including entire heads and foetuses, but did not say anything about how to preserve only skin. On the contrary, Pole advised to remove the cuticle from a head that was to be preserved,  as this would give ‘a brightness to the complexion’.[1]

However, with the growing popularity of taxidermy – the mounting of animal skins in lifelike poses – and the rise of physical anthropology in the early nineteenth century, there were a number of experiments with human taxidermy, the most famous of which was probably Jeremy Bentham’s unsuccessful attempt to have his body made into an ‘auto-icon’ after this death. Then there was ‘el negro’ or ‘the negro of Banyoles’, whose faith was described by Dutch author Frank Westerman in his 2004 book El Negro en ik (‘El negro and I’). The remains of this young African San man were stuffed by two taxidermists, the French Verreaux brothers, in the 1830s, and remained on display in a local Museum in Banyoles, Spain, until 1997. Eventually his remains were send for burial in Botswana in 2000. Jules Pierre (1807-1837) and Jean Baptiste Édouard (1810-1868) Verreaux created taxidermy specimens of exotic animals for their father’s Parisian shop in natural historical objects, Maison Verreaux, and, as ‘el negro’ shows, used human bones for his models.

For a long time, ‘el negro’ was the only known case of nineteenth-century human taxidermy. However, a recent discovery suggests that the Verreaux brothers used human remains more frequently. In 2016, a human skull was discovered in a mannequin that was part of an ensemble made by the Verreaux studio. Formerly known as “Arab Courier Attacked by Lions”, it was restored and returned to display at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History in Pittsburgh under the title “Lion Attacking a Dromedary”. Although apparently no attempt was made to use human skin in the Pittsburgh diorama, these cases show that there was little reticence when it came to using human materials for taxidermy displays in the nineteenth century, particularly when the human in question was considered ‘exotic’. This is supported by the fact that a popular contemporary taxidermy manual, aimed specifically at museums and travelers, opened with a paragraph on the impossibility of applying taxidermy to man successfully. The book, written by the naturalist Sarah Bowdich (née Wallis, later Lee, 1791-1856) saw six editions – the first in 1820, the last in 1843.

After listing the necessary tools and giving a number of recipes for the cleansing and preservation fluids used in taxidermy, Bowdich opened the section on ‘the preparation of mammalia’ with a somewhat disappointed-sounding statement:

1. Of man 

All the efforts of man to restore the skin of his fellow creature to its natural form and beauty, have hitherto been fruitless: the trials which have been made have only produced mis-shapen, hideous objects, and so unlike nature, that they have never found a place in our collections. 

Bowdich went on to discuss the life-like wet preparations made by Amsterdam anatomist Frederik Ruysch (1638  – 1731) as ‘without doubt (…) very useful to science’, before switching to a description of a more successful practice – the preservation of skeletons. Given the tragic history of ‘el negro’ and many other violently obtained human remains in museum collections, it is a cold comfort that the naturalists of the nineteenth century failed at the taxidermy of their ‘fellow creature’.

[1] Pole, Thomas. The Anatomical Instructor ; or an Illustration of the Modern and Most Approved Methods of Preparing and Preserving the Different Parts of the Human Body and of Quadrupeds by Injection, Corrosion, Maceration, Distention, Articulation, Modelling, &C. London: Couchman & Fry, 1790: p.84.