“A Replica of the Medicean Venus; with removable entrails”
I squinted at the museum placard, translated the description from German to English on Google, and squinted again.
Of the many words I could use to describe the life-sized wax woman lying down at my eye level, Venus dropped low on the list. For one, in my Percy Jackson-level knowledge of mythology, the goddess of beauty rarely shows her abdomen splayed open like a science project.
This woman is one of many Anatomical Venuses that grace the medical museums of Europe, initially commissioned as life-sized figures to teach anatomy without the hassle and smell of a rotting cadaver. When displayed in a museum, her wax glows under the overhead lights as if to let her unblemished, naked skin pop against the display case. Her breasts peel back, opened like a chapterbook to display her lungs, and a tiny stomach overflows with the organs waiting inside. Even in surgery, her eyes flutter open, long goldspun hair and a pearl necklace accentuating her neck.
Last fall, while doing research in Austria, I encountered the Anatomical Venus for the first time in Vienna’s Josephinum. One of her sisters followed me to Budapest’s Semmelweis Museum, and others beckoned me to visit them in Florence’s La Specola. The Anatomical Venus has male counterparts, most of them stand fully erect and skinned, showing off how their muscles bulge in motion. However, they didn’t seem to capture as much intrigue from myself or my fellow museum visitors. The Anatomical Venus lays on a velvet bed though, welcoming us to take our time and — thanks to her removable organs — take her apart.
Where in the cultural zeitgeist of 18th-century Europe had this woman sprung? And to what extent would she still follow me from gross anatomy class to clinical rounds?
It’s hard to put my reaction to the Anatomical Venus into a single word. Shock, possibly. Yet shock can be both positive and negative. Disappointment that a life-sized Barbie used to teach female anatomy - my anatomy? Maybe, though I don’t think Barbie is a fair comparison. Maybe I even felt a small sense of pride. I’m starting medical school this summer, and this woman will never get off her reclining couch.
Despite my doubts, I couldn’t stop thinking about Venus long after I left the Josephinum. It was as if she followed me back to New York, languidly taking up three seats in economy class, and begging me to look at her some more. Where in the cultural zeitgeist of 18th-century Europe had this woman sprung? And to what extent would she still follow me from gross anatomy class to clinical rounds?
Medicine’s perception of the female body did not start with the Anatomical Venus. However, she feels like a crucial lamppost in the history that brings us to 2024’s less-than-ideal state of women’s health. Despite the NIH requirement that women be included in federally-funded research, a recent analysis shows that they are still underrepresented in medical trials involving everything from treating cancer to heart problems. A 2020 article reported that searching “semen” on PubMed returns almost thirty-eight times more results than a search for “menstrual blood.” Women of color and pregnant women face even more severe underrepresentation in research, which may be part of the reason that Black women are 2.6 times more likely to die from pregnancy-related complications than white women.
Perhaps I spoke too soon when I said the Anatomical Venus filled me with pride. What if we haven’t come as far as I thought we had?
While many today consider the discipline a science, anatomy has a long-standing reliance on the field of art. How else could the visual information of a person’s insides be communicated in the era before the camera? Yet art has a tendency to sop up a culture — its values and biases meshed together — much better than it manages to depict reality.
In the exploration of anatomy, artists and doctors shared a sort of symbiosis. Artists relied on doctors for access to cadavers, while doctors relied on artists to accurately depict the anatomy these cadavers taught. Renaissance sculptor Michelangelo engaged in anatomical dissections that allowed him to create the “heroic male” musculature in his David statue (or even in his female Libyan Sybil.) Da Vinci also engaged in dissections that informed his construction of the Vitruvian Man, a perfectly proportioned human figure.
It seems only fair to ask: why didn’t Da Vinci create a Vitruvian woman?
Da Vinci at least tried to study female bodies; his 1508 study of female anatomy came pretty close. Of course, he also based several female organs on animal ones, and he carried a strange belief in a nonexistent vein that connected the ovaries to the breasts.
One explanation for these shortcomings was that female corpses were rare. Executed prisoners were a significant source of anatomical cadavers; not only were women the minority of this demographic, but they couldn’t be executed if pregnant.
Besides the paucity of cadavers, a second explanation lies in culture. In both art and anatomy, male bodies were considered the universal prototype, females the aberration or “reproductive other.” From prehistoric times, the earliest depictions of female bodies exaggerate their reproductive organs, and their fertility, above all else. Even the Venus de Medici, on which her anatomical sister is based, is a 100 BC depiction of the fertility goddess from Greece.
This isn’t of course to say that any piece of art tradition is objectively good or bad, beautiful or preposterous. Yet it’s easy to look at this pattern and see how it seeped into early depictions of the female body, those that came before the Anatomical Venus. It explains why, for example, in a 1541 anatomy book, the male figure is shown completely dissected, the female figure only torn apart around her reproductive organs.
“In medicine, things are often presented as objective or fact. In art history, one considers more of a subjective or cultural experience,” says Allison Hill-Edgar, an artist, medical doctor, and independent scholar.
As a DeBakey Fellow at the National Library of Medicine, Hill-Edgar has been researching representations of female anatomy in medical images and how that impacts medicine today.
“What we see in factual medical documents, what we read in medical studies, is often very much framed by a particular lens,” she adds.
Hill-Edgar is in many ways a modern version of the artist-anatomist. After completing medical school and her internship in internal medicine at Columbia, she received her Master of Fine Arts degree in painting from the New York Academy of Art and has shown her work in multiple solo and group exhibitions.
Yet nearly five hundred years after Vesalius and Da Vinci, she has still noted ways in which the female body — the body of approximately half the world — is considered a deviation.
Even though skeletons are often used to symbolize the universality of the human race, few people realize that male and female skeletons are markedly different. In 2021, Hill-Edgar needed a female skeleton for one of her art projects and explored the website of Anatomy Warehouse, a company that sells teaching skeletons to schools and hospitals. While the company offered countless options for a “universal” (or male) skeleton, it was only after pages of searching that Hill-Edgar found a female skeleton.
The least expensive female skeleton cost $1,200 in comparison to the male skeleton’s $189 (a 2024 revisit of the same site found that the female skeleton was $1305 while the male was $249).
“If we see a male skeleton, that is the skeleton.”
When she contacted the company, eventually having a conversation with the director, he noted to her that the pricing was a matter of supply and demand. Hill-Edgar eventually relented and bought the expensive skeleton out of necessity, and Anatomy Warehouse sent her an extra bag of assorted female bones as consolation.
“If we see a male skeleton, that is the skeleton,” says Hill-Edgar. “And if women’s bodies are still being treated as such a separate category that’s so much less frequent that it needs to be priced five times as much, yeah, we’re never going to have representation.”
The Anatomical Venus came about in the late 1700s by the command of Leopold II, who commissioned wax artist Clemente Susini to create life-sized anatomical models for Florence’s first public science museum — La Specola. Susini attempted to accurately depict the internal anatomy from real-life dissections prepared for the commissioned wax artists, but he also took artistic liberty in preparing his figures’ poses.
At the time, many visitors to Florence were wealthy European aristocrats embarking on their “Grand Tour,” the Enlightenment equivalent of a study-abroad bender across the continent. Florence was the city of art, and the fertility goddess Venus was a long-standing symbol of the city. Visitors already flocked to Titian’s Venus d’Urbino, Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, and the aforementioned Venus de Medici. Why not make them flock to one more Venus, this one a teaching tool? In many ways, the Anatomical Venus was an 18th-century take on science communication.
“La Specola was the first museum open to everyone, accepting visitors from any social class,” says Roberta Ballestriero, lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts of Venice. “From the aristocracy to the working class.”
In an interview, she explained to me why the artists bothered giving some of the Anatomical Venuses long flowing hair and jewelry. In some instances, these accessories covered a scar on the model’s neck, the cut of her removable abdomen. Felice Fontana, La Specola’s museum director, insisted that the models be unblemished. The public wouldn’t typically want to look at a decaying body, but maybe they would be forced or compelled to look at something that invited them to.
“To see nudity in Britain might have been shocking. In Florence, Italy, it’s the air you’re breathing.”
“More than saying if there were beautiful craftwork or not, it is important to remember that they were useful didactic models,” Ballestriero says. “They were helping ordinary people understand some anatomy, especially those with no knowledge or resources.”
Joanna Ebenstein, author of The Anatomical Venus: Wax, God, Death & the Ecstatic, now directs the Morbid Anatomy Library, a modern-day Wunderkammer nestled in Brooklyn’s Industry City and open to the public. Months after seeing the Anatomical Venus for the first time, I visited the space to learn more.
Ebenstein explained that my contemporary reaction to the wax figure was likely different from that of the model’s target audience. Guestbooks from La Specola mostly speak of visitors in awe, not people shocked or disgusted by her nudity.
“To see nudity in Britain might have been shocking. In Florence, Italy, it’s the air you’re breathing,” she said. “I think this is why it’s so important to visit the place where things were made because you get a totally different perspective.”
Ballestriero supported this viewpoint. “The view of Anatomical Venuses was common for Florentines and Italians in general as they were used to beautiful sculptures. On the other hand foreigners and people from other cultures were often taken aback and found these anatomical representations unsettling.”
“The place where it crosses a boundary is the fact that it’s supposed to be a medical representation, which in our day and age is considered an objective one. It’s clearly not objective.”
Both agree that, even if the Anatomical Venuses started as a teaching tool, they later became sexualized. Ballestriero notes that copies of her went on tour across Europe as the centerpiece of fairground exhibitions, some of which were men’s-only. In response to one such exhibition in London, the Literary Gazette called the Anatomical Venus “a filthy French figure” and “as indecent as it is wretched.”
Hill-Edgar gave her own comment on the Anatomical Venus, acknowledging that even though much artistic representation of women historically has been sexualized, that doesn’t make it right when it appears in medicine. “The place where it crosses a boundary is the fact that it’s supposed to be a medical representation, which in our day and age is considered an objective one. It's clearly not objective,” she said.
“At the time, they were exploratory models, you were supposed to take out the parts, and the ultimate place that you got to was the open uterus with the fetus inside,” she explained. “So there was this whole tactile exploration of a dead woman’s body who was sexually alive.”
“I feel it’s really about your personal response,” Ebenstein said in our interview. “I find it still a beautiful and complicated thing, And I also very very strongly feel that complicated things should be shown.”
Growing up in Austin, Texas, I did not learn my anatomy basics from a museum. Instead, in the sixth grade, I checked out a medical encyclopedia from the library and resolved to read it from A to Z. A curly-haired girl who saw me lugging the opus against my chest from class to class asked if that meant I wanted to be a doctor. I remember that was the first time anyone had asked me that question.
While I didn’t retain much from my week-long dive from “Aarskog syndrome” to “Zollinger-Ellison,” it’s unlikely that I saw many women inside that encyclopedia. As late as 1986, an analysis of anatomical textbooks showed that 11% of gendered images outside of the chapter detailing the reproductive system were of women. Never mind that women have different skeletons, different manifestations of cardiac disease, and different rates of drug metabolism. The percentage of female images among images that are gendered in anatomy textbooks rose to an average of 32%in a 1994 analysis, then crept to 36% in a 2017 one.
When gendered images are shown, the pattern remains similar to what a visitor might have seen in La Specola: A typically white “muscle man” depicts the majority of “normal” anatomy, while a young, toned woman depicts her reproductive system. Some images of women from above or from a caudal (camera between the legs) perspective remind me a bit too much of some of the Anatomical Venus’ descendants, some of which include white-cuffed, phantom hands that pry open a surgical incision or help a viewer see more of the female genitalia. It’s perhaps not a surprise that these biased images have been shown to implicitly shape our gender biases.
“Not considering women or different races as equal parts of the fabric of medicine is leading to really disastrous outcomes.”
Even if there were female depictions, any anatomical depictions of people of color, male or female, are rare. A 2022 German analysis of three textbooks, six atlases, and two e-learning platforms found that only three illustrations, or approximately one in 100,000 images, showed a non-white person. Never mind that skin diseases may appear differently on people of color or that different racial or ethnic communities may have genetic risk factors for diseases such as sickle cell anemia.
Hill-Edgar has noted in her research that, in the history of female anatomy, bodies of women of color were often treated with even lower ethical standards than their white counterparts. Enslaved women were subject to hypersexualization and unconsented examination in the name of medical study.
Take Sarah Baartmann for example. Her adult life in the 1810s was spent traveling Europe with her enslaver under the derogatory moniker “the Hottentot Venus.” For a price, spectators ogled her buttocks (unusually large due to a genetic condition) and subjected her to various forms of sexual abuse. After her death, her genitals remained on display at Paris’ Museum of Man until 1974, remains not returned to her hometown in South Africa by 2002.
“Not considering women or different races as equal parts of the fabric of medicine is leading to really disastrous outcomes,” she said.
Medicine prides itself on its long tradition of building on the past, and in visiting all these medical museums I felt tempted to build a strange solidarity with the (mostly) men who learned from these materials, and used these (now-rusty) surgical instruments on real people. If I met these medical students of the past, could we bond over the human body and the infinity of miracles that keep it alive?
Yet as I wandered through these museums, the Anatomical Venus always lingered as a sort of awakening, reminding me that I am not a medical student of the past, nor will I ever be. If I met the medical students of the past, they might just wonder how a living woman got inside the anatomy theatre.
Hill-Edgar shared her own complicated feelings about her role in the art-anatomy tradition. “Even more than an affinity with the artist-anatomists, at this point, I feel a very strong affinity with the female bodies,” she says.
“As a woman, when you see some of these things, you try to understand who was this person?” she asks. “Why her body? Why was it represented this way? I definitely feel like, in many ways, those women are the ones inspiring me.”
Yet as I wandered through these museums, the Anatomical Venus always lingered as a sort of awakening, reminding me that I am not a medical student of the past, nor will I ever be.
If art does tend to sop up an era, there’s still hope for the creators of today to modernize anatomy. For example, Chidiebere Ibe, a Nigerian medical student at Copperbelt University in Zambia and a medical illustrator with Harvard, focuses his portfolio on illustrations that depict people of color.
In 2021, Ibe posted one of his illustrations of a pregnant Black woman and her fetus with the caption “I’m black and black is beautiful!” Ibe says that this is the first image he’s seen of a black fetus in utero.
The online response to the image was overwhelming, with coverage from Bloomberg, HuffPost, CNN, and others. “I had a woman who literally called me in tears because they felt represented,” he said.
Ibe is currently running a training program at Copperbelt University for medical students to become medical illustrators, and last June, he participated in the launch of Illustrate Change by Johnson and Johnson, an online anatomy library of racially diverse illustrations.
I asked Ibe the same question I had asked Hill-Edgar: do you feel a solidarity with the artist-anatomists of the past, or do you feel like you are charting your own way?
“To create something for the future, we need to reflect on the past. Right?” he returned the question to me.
When I ponder this exchange, in many ways this answer is as grey as the Anatomical Venus herself: neither dead nor alive, neither human nor doll. Her world hides dark pockets that demand we do better, but it also led me to people bringing this history forward. While I might not want to go back and say hello to every medic of the past, I too can be who I want to be for the students of the future.
“How can something that makes you want to know more about its history — how can that be bad?”
At the end of the day, the Anatomical Venus was designed to make me look. And she did her job, taking me from Vienna to Brooklyn with calls to Nigeria, through thousands of years of history to questions about my own future. Not bad for a Barbie I initially criticized for not being able to get off the couch.
In my conversation with Ebenstein, she shared a similar sentiment about her relationship with the Anatomical Venus. “I feel like I could spend the rest of my life going down all the paths that lead from that and not have enough time to finish,” she said.
“How can something that makes you want to know more about its history — how can that be bad?”
