Hocken Collections Gallery, Dunedin, 2005
medical body book
The Medical Body (2005) is an exhibition that explores the ways in which the human body has been used as a teaching and research tool by utilising objects derived from the University of Otago Medical School. It showcases a collection of instructional devices from the anatomical watercolour paintings of John Halliday Scott - the School’s first dean (1877 -1914) to slide biopsies prepared by former staff and students of the Anatomy Department - among them New Zealand’s first female graduate of medicine Emily Siedeberg-McKinnon. Whilst the exhibition aims to provide a context for the way in which the body has and continues to be viewed medically, it also subjects scientific instruments and tools to a new kind of public display.
Redundant vials, pipettes and test-tubes from the Department of Physiology are utilised by contemporary artists Don Hunter and Ana Terry who sculpturally transform the materials, conjuring a three-dimensional view of the body as a fragile container. Vials partially filled with fluid mimic the notion of the body as both liquid and solid. The medium of glass here acts like a lens, evoking an altered perspective on normally functional instruments while its transparency recalls the ways in which solid bodies can similarly be made translucent with the aid of 21st century medical technologies and resonant computer imaging.
Today’s teaching tools have clearly surpassed the sorts of objects that are installed here. Yet as a testament to the accuracy of Scott’s instructional charts, his paintings were still in use in the Department of Anatomy up until around a decade ago. Refined, factual and communicative, Scott’s anatomical paintings are at once practical aids to learning that are executed in the ‘no-frills’ style of Gray’s classic text on Anatomy, while at the same time they reveal a sense of beauty and wonder in their subject. In the artist’s delicate use of watercolour and his deft handling of anatomical and microscopic intricacies, the body is rendered as a ‘lesser world’ – a human microcosm.
Indeed during Scott’s time as a teacher the body was to be viewed in an increasingly abstract manner. Anatomical illustrations became more scientifically specific and microscopy became integral to the teaching of the medical sciences. The cabinet of histological slides evidence the findings of this artful science in their beautifully coloured biopsies while Hunter and Terry’s installation mimics the stellar and molecular nature of the cellular world.
Though they are largely historic, the objects that feature in The Medical Body elicit an understanding of ourselves that still holds true today - an age in which a sustained attention to medical themes finds us looking for the truth of the body on ever-more minute levels. Pennie Hunt, 2005