A red chalk drawing of a fetus at nine months gestation by Jan van Rymsdyk -- and the story behind it

This drawing by medical illustrator Jan van Rymsdyk is dated 1764. It was published in 1774 in William Hunter's The Anatomy of the human gravid uterus. It is in the collection of the University of Glasgow Library.

I've been reading Wendy Moore's The Knife Man, a biography of John Hunter, younger brother and assistant to William Hunter, the author of the book in which this picture appeared.  In fact, the picture itself figures in one of the chapters.

As Moore explains, pregnant women on whom to perform anatomical dissections were hard to come by in the mid-eighteenth century, so William Hunter, who owned and operated an anatomical school in London with the assistance of his younger brother John, was more than ready to seize the moment when the body of a woman in her ninth month of pregnancy was deposited at his doorstep. William delegated John to perform a detailed dissection and Jan van Rymsdyk to illustrate. One of the results was the red chalk drawing above. (I was intrigued enough by Moore's description of van Rymsdyk's work to track down one of the drawings.)

It is very likely that the cadaver was obtained by grave robbers under the direction of John Hunter, who, according to Moore, turned the rather rare crime of body snatching into a thriving industry that emptied coffins throughout London in the second half of that century and the beginning of the next when the passage of the Anatomy Act of 1832 made the study of the human body possible without the need for "Resurrectionists." On the brighter side, John's dissections gave him the practice he needed to become a great surgeon -- great enough to be considered the father of modern surgery.

Comments

[Pixie]

That is beautiful... the rendering.

When my ex-husband was in his last year of medical school, he took me to the 'cadaver lab'. On the wall were jars of fetuses... week to week, and then... the largest jar with a perfectly normal baby (by all appearances)...

My question was: how did they get these babies? How did they have all the stages of development in jars??? It was very disturbing for me.

It still is. I think that if I had been exposed to the "wall of creation" earlier... like when I was 21.. I might have made a different choice.

OUT.

[Zsa Zsa]

Beautiful...