Time: 7 pm Eastern time
Admission: $8 - Tickets HERE
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Anatomy was an open area of inquiry in the ancient Mediterranean. Before the authoritative books that came to dominate the field—Vesalius’ Fabrica, Gray’s Anatomy—numerous anatomical texts (and claims) were in competition with each other. The Greek doctor Galen emerged victorious from the fray, and his work shaped western understanding of the body from his own day, in the second century CE, until the sixteenth century, when Vesalius (himself a huge fan of Galen) made his mark.
The competitive anatomical world that Galen operated within produced scores of texts. It also developed a spectacular culture of public dissection and vivisection of animals as a means through which to prove theories and assert authoritative knowledge.
This lecture will explore this world, presenting several of Galen’s public, vivisectory experiments—for example, his show-stopping demonstration of the function of the nerves that control the voice and his proof that the brain is the seat of sensation—and introducing the high-stakes, bloody phenomenon of compelled dissection, in which doctors sprang animals on unsuspecting colleagues and forced them to prove their anatomical chops in front of an eager crowd.
Claire Bubb is an Assistant Professor at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. She received her Ph.D. in Classical Philology from Harvard University, and her research centers on Greco-Roman science, especially medicine and the biological sciences. She co-curated the new online exhibition The Empire’s Physician: Prosperity, Plague, and Healing in Ancient Rome, and her upcoming book, Dissection in Antiquity: A Social and Medical History, charts the development of the practice of dissection in Classical Antiquity from the early traces in the 5th century BCE to its heyday in Imperial Rome.
Image: Vesalius undertaking a dissection, in the hand-coloured frontispiece to his 'Epitome' (1543)