The phrenological illustrations of George Cruickshank (1792-1878): A satire on phrenology or human nature?

For a brief period in1826, George Cruickshank (1798-1878), already an established artist in political satire and book illustration, turned to phrenology. He produced one initial print (Bumpology), followed by a collection of six plates of 33 engravings, linked by an explanatory preface, under the title, Phrenological Illustrations or an Artist's View of the Craniological System of Doctors Gall and Spurzheim. It was published during what is regarded as "the phrenological craze" in Britain. The illustrations were also produced at the height of Cruickshank's staggering creative productivity. In 1873, as phrenology was making its exit from scientific credibility into history, Cruickshank's phrenological illustrations were reissued by popular demand. Yet in contrast to his other works, these illustrations have received little attention in modern scholarship. The ways and the extent to which his caricatures constitute a contribution to the history of phrenology deserve to be studied. Here they are analyzed together with his descriptions in the prefaces to both the 1826 and 1873 editions. They reveal a surprising knowledge of phrenology in relation to Spurzheim and Gall. Furthermore, their uniquely innovative features will be identified in the context of other contemporary caricatures, and the fundamental significance of Cruickshank's achievement and its impact will be evaluated.

Vesalius and the emergence of veridical representation in Renaissance anatomy.

The Renaissance marks the introduction of veridical representation of anatomical structure into printed books. For centuries, anatomy that had relied solely on textual description and the authority of the written word was transformed. An existing graphic tradition only visualized function within a humoral theory, schematically "naming the parts" or mapping the "uses of the parts" for mnemonic purposes. In the sixteenth century, anatomists and artist began to apply their knowledge and skills to present the "fabric" of the dissected human body with increasing detail and accuracy, exemplified by the naturalistic illustrations of the brain in Vesalius' De humani corporis fabrica (Basel, 1543). How did this transformation occur? Among the causal factors, the importance the humanist textual scholarship will be shown not only in the recovery of the anatomical writings of Galen (129-ca. 216), in particular, but also in providing a model in establishing anatomical "truth" by a method of "comparison." It will be argued that Vesalius' comparative approach in dissection, using both human and animal preparations against Galen's textual description, paved the way for cumulative observations of greater detail, which in turn required the representational skills of artists. An analysis of Vesalius' views between 1538 and 1543 shows a shift in the use of illustrations from serving as a visual record to compensate for limited access to cadavers in teaching, to becoming an indispensable tool to accurately convey detailed anatomical structure through the medium of printing. With the Fabrica, morphology became divorced from humoral function and enduring paradigms established that dominated until the nineteenth century.

Chapter 6: after Galen Late Antiquity and the Islamic world.

It is usually assumed that after Galen there was nothing new until the Renaissance. Contrary to this view, there were significant modifications of the inherited legacy in Late Antiquity, followed by fundamental changes within the Arabic/Islamic world. Their formative influence extends from the medieval period of transmission to the Renaissance and the 17th century. The increasing emphasis on the primacy of the brain initiated the beginnings of ventricular localization of function in Late Antiquity, which was subsequently developed into a theory and transmitted to the West via Arabic. Following the unprecedented translation movement in 9th-century Baghdad, the cumulative Greek and Hellenistic knowledge of the brain, nerves, and the senses from diverse sources were brought together in the systematic, logically unified Arabic medical compendia of encyclopedic proportions, which embody divergence from accepted views and new diagnostic observations. Their Latin versions became standard texts in medical schools. The oldest extant schematic diagrams relevant to neurology (the eye, the ventricles, the visual system, and the nerves) date from this period, and served as models for the medieval Latin West. The development of coherent descriptions of the motor and sensory systems, and related clinical disorders, by analogy with the mechanisms of hydraulic automata, foreshadows some of the explanatory methods associated with the 17th century. Furthermore, an entirely new approach resulted in a paradigm shift in theory and methodology through the experimental studies on the physics of light and vision of Ibn al-Haytham (d. 1040), who showed that what is sensed is not the object itself, but a punctate optical "image" due to light reflected from its surface to the eye. This revolutionary approach to vision destroyed the viability of the Greek tradition of holistic forms and tactile sensory impressions. Ibn al-Haytham's theory of point-to-point correspondence formed the basis of subsequent attempts to find a topological representation of external objects in the eye (the retinal surface with Kepler) and in the brain (the pineal gland with Descartes and ultimately in the cortex with Munk). His serial re-projection of the punctate image in the eye, chiasma, and the brain can be regarded as dramatic precursors of the principles in neurology of hierarchical anatomical organization of sensory information from simple to complex. Due to Ibn al-Haytham, an understanding of vision increasingly required a synthesis of anatomy with the physics of light. Subsequently the visual enquiry shifted from the global question of "how do we perceive the external world by the sense of sight?" to specific concerns arising from the implications of Ibn al-Haytham's "optical" image in the eye: (a) the preservation of a point-to-point correspondence between object and image; (b) image inversion and the veridical (upright) perception of the object; (c) the unity of perception, or the binocular fusion of the two separate images, one from each eye; and (d) the anatomical projection of the retinal maps to various brain centers. The fact that these became central issues extending to Descartes and beyond underscores the unique legacy in neurology of Ibn al-Haytham's conception of a punctate sensory map, which was re-projected to the brain for complex sensory functions.

The 'horns' of a medical dilemma: Alexander the Great.

Retrospective 'diagnosis' of clinical disorders of famous historical figures has been of medical interest. In the absence of a patient's 'body', the validity of 'physical symptoms' and their interpretation by contemporary diagnostic criteria are questionable. When the symptoms have been gleaned from the patients's effigy which, as in the case of Alexander the Great, is submerged in legend, the enterprise becomes inherently hazardous. In the present paper, some of the conceptual problems underlying retrospective diagnoses will be identified. Then the use of iconographic records, such as numismatics and sculpture, to provide evidence of clinical symptoms will be shown to be highly misleading.