Library Notes

The Anatomy of Gender: Arts of the Body in Early Modern Europe, a diverse media exhibit at the Block Museum on the Evanston Campus, includes a dozen or so rare books from the Galter Library's Special Collections. The exhibit is curated by Lyle Massey, assistant professor of art history, Northwestern University, and organized by the Block Museum. Other materials have been loaned from the Alabama Museum of Health Sciences, University of Alabama at Birmingham; Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections, Northwestern University, Evanston; Library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia; Science Museum, London; University of Chicago Library, Special Collections Research Center; and the Victoria and Albert Museum, London. Bringing together images in prints, printed books, and small sculptures in ivory and wax, the exhibit explores the complex attitudes toward visualizing sexual differences in early Western elite and popular culture.

Valverde's Vivae imagines partium corporis humani aereis formis expressae, 1572

To complement the exhibit, a symposium organized by Dr. Massey was held on the Evanston Campus at the Block Museum of Art on January 28, 2006, which brought together art historians, science historians, and cultural theorists. The symposium discussed the impact of anatomical images across disciplines and other issues raised by the exhibition.

Speakers included: Monica Green (Arizona State University), Gynecology Without Women: On Traditions of Non-representation in Medieval Women's Medicine; Katharine Park (Harvard University,) The "One-Sex Body" in Medieval Europe: A History of an Idea; Daniel Garrison (Northwestern University), What Did Vesalius Say? The Galenic and Aristotelian Background; Rebecca Messbarger (Washington University, St. Louis), Beneath the Fig Leaf: The Study of the Male Reproductive System and Genitalia by Anatomist and Anatomical Wax Modeler Anna Morandi Manzolini; Lyle Massey (Northwestern University) On Waxes and Wombs: Eighteenth-century Dissections of the Gravid Uterus; respondents were: Edward Muir (Northwestern University) and Lawrence Lipking (Northwestern University).

The exhibit is in the Alsdorf Gallery at the Museum from January 3, 2006 through March 12, 2006.