Sawbones: A Marital Tour of Misguided Medicine - Sawbones: Medical Illustration
Episode Date: September 21, 2018We take for granted that we know what bodies look like on the inside, but this week on Sawbones we honor those brave pioneers that had to draw them for the very first time. Also Dr. Sydnee and Justin ...explore the scandal behind the most famous book of medical illustrations. Music: "Medicines" by The Taxpayers
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Saubones is a show about medical history, and nothing the hosts say should be taken as medical advice or opinion.
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Alright, time is about to books.
One, two, one, two, three, four. Hello everybody and welcome to Saul Bones,
where I'm able to with Miss Guy to Medicine,
I'm your co-host Justin McElroy.
And I'm Sydney McElroy.
Are you gonna do that voice every week now?
Is that you?
If I had a streak of it going, you have.
Okay, I won't anymore.
I'm just excited to be alive.
Excited to be me, excited to be alive.
Excited to next week go to Portland and Seattle.
Me too.
In the PNW, as everyone there refers to it,
the Pacific Northwest.
Really?
Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, I'm aware of the Pacific Northwest,
but I'd never heard PNW.
You think they already got their Halloween decorations up?
Why?
Why would you think Halloween hits the West Coast first? I just
don't know. You're trying to see him sprout up right here. I don't know if they get deep
into it. It's gonna be a little cooler there, which I'm kind of looking forward to.
Ah, so of course. I'm kind of thinking that maybe, um, you know, maybe the
hustle and Halloween decorations. You just think that because you think it's kind of a spooky
part of the country. So powerful.'s like twin peaks is from that area
and obviously twilight.
And area Indiana.
That's it, no.
The thing is, that's Indiana.
We were talking about Seattle
and how did we get there?
So it's a Seattle and then we were thinking about like,
we like to do locally themed shows,
which we are not going to do this time for reasons that we come out of it. And we're thinking about like, we like to do locally themed shows, which we are not gonna do this time
for reasons that we come out of it.
And we're talking about Seattle,
we're talking about Grey's Anatomy.
And it's like, is there something there
with the Grey's Anatomy?
Not the, right.
So Grey's Anatomy, the TV show,
which takes its name from Grey's Anatomy, the book,
which the Grey is spelled different.
I feel like, I am, so I'm very curious. I feel like
I'm not to impune the quality of the show. I've never watched it really. I feel like every time I see
that show is still on, I'm like, wow, that show is still on, huh? I watched it for a while and then
I kind of lost interest because for me, the medicine was the more interesting part of all those
medical shows. Right. When you spend so much time on romantic drama,
just not my thing.
It has, that show has been on for 14 seasons,
317 episodes are you kidding me?
I also find those shows way more interesting
when they're in residency and stuff.
And once they're attendings,
I don't know. Less intriguing. But may I say that as a boring attending myself? But what did this get us? So anyway, I started, I started looking into the history of the book
Gray's Anatomy. The book the show is based on? Yes. I mean, based on the title only, let me say.
I mean, based on the entitled Only, let me say. Not based on.
Adapted from.
And then it started to get me thinking about
like the history of anatomical drawings,
like the medical illustrations,
the artwork of drawing bodies, I guess.
Okay.
Because that's a, that was an important skill
that was developed over time that kind of evolved alongside art
in order for us to study and understand the human body.
Right? I mean, how else do you communicate what's inside a body unless you have like pictures of it?
No, we don't. We don't have photos for sure. No, that's not.
Well, no, no, not at the ancient history, you're right.
I'm saying, in the point that we had to start with
like probably cave drawings and stuff of like,
this is a butt, in case you see one of these
between the legs and the stomach.
Here's what you're working with, it's a butt.
Why does it have a hole?
Why does it have a crack?
We don't know, we plan to write some good jokes about it
here in the next few millennia, but we're still in the dark on butts.
Well, we know they're called butts.
Good. I look at Jerry has positioned himself on his, on a rock. He calls it sitting.
Is this the purpose of butts? We do not know.
So we've done a whole episode. Sitting may be the devil.
Might be cursed.
You might be cursed because Jerry said his legs started to tingle with magic.
After he sat, he did past tense.
Oh, by the way, he invented past tense too.
And he invented the past tense of sitting, which is sat, the gerund.
What did I say?
His legs are tingling.
So obviously, let's try some blood
letting let some of the blood out. That seems blood for sitting. That seems like the
first treatment. Okay, so we've talked about the history of dissection and I'm I'm
I'm going to go into that just a little we've done a whole episode about it so I
don't want to belabor the point but obviously before we could draw pictures of
the inside of the human body, we had to see it.
The word anatomy, by the way, dates back to the ancient Greek for cutting up or taking
apart.
So anatomy, while it describes, you know, it is our anatomy.
We're talking about the thing that is our body and the stuff inside it.
Cutting it up or taking apart and looking at it as intrinsic to the word itself.
Hypocrites was not big on dissection. It just wasn't really done back at that time.
The idea of cutting into the human body was first of all kind of taboo. And secondly,
it was thought to be dangerous. Even before the concept of what an infection was,
the idea of a dead body was, again,
and I'm using the word infected,
they would not have used that exact word
because they didn't know about germs, yeah.
But there was something contaminated about the body
and to cut into it would contaminate you as well.
So you wouldn't have been doing a lot of dissections back in that time, but he did make a lot of
observations about external parts and accidentally viewed internal parts through wounds and things
like that.
But he didn't do drawings, at least that I could find anywhere based on that.
And the other thing too, as I started to think about,
but why was anybody drawing anything?
Well, also, it would be unlikely
that some of that stuff would exist still.
I mean, it's not as easy to copy as text.
Sure.
You know, so, and that's part of this story as well.
The first dissection was probably done by Herophilus in Alexandria in the third century BCE
with the help of his assistant Eras Arastratus.
Arastratus.
I'm assuming this is a post-mortem to use a fancy term.
Yes.
And what do the doctors do?
I guess autopsy, if you will, but dissection as well.
I mean, I think you're, I think you could use those words at this time interchangeably, but it's really
you have different purposes, you know.
Right.
For yes.
What I, when I, when I-
Sex and educational about the body.
Yeah.
And autopsy is specific to learning about the victim of the perp as they say.
Now again, I'm just, or, we don't have to be a crime. Like the perp as they say.
Now again, I'm just, or,
we're gonna have to be a crime.
Like, we're just causing death.
That's the one I was saying on TV, we're crime.
Well, sure, the ones you've seen on TV,
do you know those are also fake, right?
What do you got next?
Except for one time, but we'll get into that.
Whoa.
He was celebrated by the scientific community
for doing this dissection,
and he was given the title,
the father of anatomy, because he was the first one to be like, Hey, I, I thought
that's gone. But okay.
God, the holy father of God, Abraham, that's your opinion.
Okay, everybody sees that differently.
From his descriptions, we got a better understanding of things like veins
and arteries. He described reproductive organs. He described the pancreas. He wrote a lot
about the process of childbirth. However, it was later reported that he performed like
600 vivisections. So some of them like partial dissections on
Prisoners
Maybe some while they were still alive. Oh, no. Yeah. Oh
No, so I don't think there were as many rules at that time if any about
Humane treatment of people even if they were prisoners or even if they were sentenced to death. I think that, and you'll see this kind of.
This dude's gonna be for anyway.
Well, you see this theme where it's like,
well, they've been sentenced to death,
so we may as well.
And that's not-
Like, that's wild.
I wish I'd been there,
because I'd been like,
my dude were all sentenced to death.
Like, can we not, please?
At the school there in Alexandria,
you see some of the first anatomical drawings
that were created based on these dissections.
So he created this culture
that you could dissect a human body that after,
I mean, hopefully after,
but maybe sometimes before someone had died,
it was acceptable to open up their body and take a look to try to learn more about the human body
with the goal that we could take this information and do something helpful with it someday, right?
But you couldn't easily reproduce any of these drawings. You would have had to
draw them again if you wanted to put them in a book and give them to somebody. So obviously,
that was a whole other...
It's a problem with all of the exchange of knowledge at this point, right?
Like you lose the original, that's it.
Yeah, because you got to write it again, because we don't have a printing press.
So yeah.
Spoilers, sheesh.
I think everybody knows it in the third century BC.
We didn't have the printing press.
Now I just see your spoiler, the printing press is going to give it.
I imagine that big,
a big milestone for this.
Some people may not know.
They don't wanna ruin it for every,
like some people may not know.
Some people might not know.
Some people may not know.
That was one of those,
there might be some people who are like,
how are they gonna solve this?
That was one of those things that I feel like
they taught me in history class though.
And I remember thinking,
why do I need to know that this happened?
I mean, like obviously I'm aware.
And then we have computers, so it doesn't matter. But yeah, that's weird, okay. I mean, you know, need to know that this happened? I mean, like, obviously I'm aware. And then we have computers, that doesn't matter.
But yeah, that's weird.
OK.
I mean, you know, like, didn't everybody learn that?
And then the printing press.
Yeah, but like, you should not, oh my god,
didn't he?
I'm not going to.
You're turning into a real Justin on this,
and I need you to keep moving.
OK.
So this put an end to dissections for a while
because of some of the issues surrounding possible
live dissection of human beings, and then there were some that created even more cultural
taboos around the processes of anatomical dissection.
And so it wasn't done for a while after that.
Galen, who we trust a lot of his medical writings and drawings
and descriptions of the human body and things,
was basically using all of his predecessors stuff
to create all of that.
He wasn't doing these dissections himself.
He was basing it on what other people had said
and drawn and described.
He was looking at wounds of gladiators.
He, a lot of what he derived about the human body was just from looking at open wounds from
gladiators. Some of it was crafty though. I kind of give it up. They got you know a
way to get a peek inside. Here. That's like the that's like the the the
extreme version of the post sports game interviews like hey champ come on over if you could just one second
Yeah, if I could just bother you for one second. How do you feel when I'm up there?
I just want to if I can just duck my head inside this spear wound
Not a lion don't lie and do that. We don't really give it our all and them
So he would also dissect monkeys and, there was a lot of assumption made
that any primate anatomy would do kind of when we're describing human anatomy.
I mean, starting from the point we were starting at, it's not completely wrong, right?
He, well, I mean, he, he definitely got stuff wrong. Um, and this was a big, I mean, I don't know if I say
there's a big problem, like I'm hating on Galen,
but the reason this became such a big problem
is because he was considered the authority.
So as time goes on, and actual dissections
start to take place again, and you're holding up
these images of what we find in actual human bodies
versus these images that what we find in actual human bodies versus these images
that Galen created based on word of mouth and monkeys.
People would actually say, well, I guess it's just
that this body is wrong because it couldn't be
that Galen was wrong.
I mean, you would look at the evidence
before your eyes and still say, well,
the cadaver must be wrong.
It's got to be, Galen couldn't have been wrong.
That's humans for you.
It wasn't until the middle ages that dissections really started up again.
And then you see more drawings produced from that.
There were some figures that were doing public dissections at this time, which obviously
would help with spreading this information as well. And furthering the study, the first one was like Mondino de Luzzi at the University of
Bologna did the first like live dissection that people could watch.
And this again, these things are important because then you can study anatomy.
It makes it okay to some extent, or at least you can justify it.
Well, that other guy did it.
Most of the anatomical drawings of this period of the Middle Ages are kind of simple,
almost like crude drawings. If you look at these and we should post some of these
to our Facebook page so people can kind of see what I'm talking about.
They largely exist to just show like a spatial relationship between
really major organs and structures. So like here's a crude outline, like a 2D flat outline of a human body, and like something
that represents a heart and something that represents a lung, and here's some intestine,
that kind of thing.
Very crude looking drawings for the most part.
They're usually pretty humanoid, but sometimes the proportions of the human body are very odd
when they're rendered.
I mean, and again, these are rendered from life, so it's not like you're guessing.
The wound man, do you remember the wound man from the episode where we have the guy with
all the, with all the like spears and knives and things sticking out of him?
Remember that guy?
That's the worst super here ever.
That's kind of a good example of antitomical art from this time.
Here's this guy who's just kind of standing there awkwardly and he's got a bunch of wounds
and implements hanging out of his body.
This was an antitomical drawing, I guess.
There were some really awkward, I found like some squatting figures that just had like
a heart and some blood vessels that vaguely represented the tracks of where but nothing was definite.
It wasn't like this blood vessel or that one.
It was just like here's some random lines, some red lines and some blue lines.
There you go.
Geochomo Barongerio DeCarpi was a famous doctor and anatomist from the 1400s who actually
dissected and illustrated
a text. He had made a name for himself, pretending to treat syphilis with mercury. He wasn't
very successful, but he did make a lot of money and became kind of famous.
So as was the fashion. And then he spent a lot of time on this text called Anatomyacarpi.
And these drawings are still somewhat simple in a lot of cases,
but there are some actual organs depicted. There's some actual close-up on like here is an
actual organ and like I'm trying to draw the structure of it, not just some vague blob,
like this is what it might look like. The human figures are really interesting and you'll
see this repeated for quite a while. And this is probably something people have looked at
through art, like in,
and if you've ever stumbled across these drawings
and ever really considered,
the figures are one, they're very idealized.
They look like perfect,
they're like godly specimens of humanity.
And I don't just mean like from a physical ideal,
whatever you consider the physical quote unquote ideal to be, I mean like from a physical ideal, whatever you consider the physical,
quote unquote ideal to be,
I mean like they look saintly,
they might have like beams of light radiating
from their body.
There are a lot of like naked men,
like muscular men like posing with like beams of light
around them and their hands are triumphantly outstretched
as they open up their skin to reveal their perfect,
perfect pectorals and their perfect abdominal muscles.
Underneath.
Yeah.
The volume eyes will have a little fun.
And they look, and they're alive.
Like the pictures of live people,
like revealing their organs.
Like slim, good body.
Yes, exactly. It's slim, good body. Yes, exactly.
It's slim, good body now.
But some of the skeletons,
because there are skeleton drawings too,
but they're like frozen and like dance-like poses
that look, they look very nice.
They're like, hello, I'm skeleton.
Look at this.
Look at my bones.
There are some people who are just standing there
like carelessly like leaning on an axe and pointing
with part of their, they're all naked,
but then sometimes you're seeing underneath as well,
like the musculature or whatever.
There are a lot of female figures
that are depicted as draped dramatically over chairs.
I almost imagine they're not on fainting
couches, but that was like the thing that reminded me like they're like, they're like,
they're like draped in the, and they, they always like, and this is in all the figures,
like somewhere their skin is just kind of split open to reveal what's underneath,
as if that has just naturally happened. Some of them are like dancing with scarves,
and then their abdominal cavity happens to be open.
I didn't realize this little good body
of touchstone that the people of today are familiar with
because that might have seemed like a weird thing for me to say.
A smooth good body.
Was he like, is he still relevant?
No, I don't think he's still relevant,
but I think there are probably people
are age who remember the character, Slim Good Body.
Unless he's listening.
In which case, you are still relevant as your good body.
And wow, can I say what an honor it is to,
just look, SlimGoodBody.com, he's still doing it.
He's still doing that thing.
He's out there on his grind.
Okay, sorry, getting it up again, for the millionth time.
This is the same era as DaVinci, by the way.
And I think you could see some of this echo
in his human figures, you know,
the anatomical drawings that DaVinci did,
which are these beautiful depictions of the human form,
also trying to be exact and show what is what, right?
Like what's underneath all the bumps?
That's what artists want to know sometimes.
What's underneath all those bumps so I can draw them better.
But so that, but also they're very beautiful as well.
Versailles comes along at this point and this was for a long time.
This was kind of like the basis of a lot of anatomical knowledge.
It was 1543, Andreas Versailles publishes De Humany, Corporus, Fabrica, Libreceptum,
which means on the fabric of the human body in seven books.
So a lot of stuff about the human body.
He did dissections, he employed a lot of different artists
to render what he was seeing
so that he could actually have somebody who was very talented,
draw the stuff, he did the dissection,
and then people watched it and...
And it's really smarter. Like, what the odds are going to be like a good
dissecter and a good draw or two? It seems low.
That's actually true. You'll find that. You'll find that a lot. The cover showed
versalius. This is really cool. So one of versalius's goals was to
contradict Galen. Like maybe even to go picture for picture
to tell everybody like, look,
Galen was not right about everything
and I'm gonna show you exactly why.
So the cover of this tone is versalius,
doing a dissection on a convicted criminal,
who I think is still alive, like they've been sentenced to death.
And there are all these people around him watching him.
And there's like a skeleton
hovering over, I guess, to creep everybody out or to like remind everyone of the specter
of death. And then there's Galen in one corner watching an Aristotle in the other corner
watching him as he does this dissection. So, Versailles, I think maybe thought a lot of
himself as well. So at this point, you have a lot of artistic advances. So like rendering
and perspective, perspective is a big deal. If you think about it, the idea of perspective and art
as that becomes a thing that really influenced the way that we could see a human body and understand
proportions a lot better. And then you also start to see the use of woodcuts to reprint the images.
So that made this book really special because you could,
and can you imagine the detail that would take to do a woodcut of the
the vascular church or something, and then reprint that.
That's amazing.
Yeah, so you have these very beautiful detailed drawings and then on the woodcut and then reprinted.
And he challenged a lot of Galen's false beliefs. They're still, by the way, 700 copies of this book.
You can find.
A grab one.
There is one in Brown University's John Hay Library,
which is bound in human skin.
Fun.
I think we've talked about that before.
We did, because they have some at the, the mutter.
They have some human skinned books.
Yep.
So there is one of those.
The anatomical art that followed of the 17 and 18th century
was just, it kind of was expanding on this.
More life, like details, obviously perspective and everything.
They also would add things like sometimes like a sheet draped
over a body or like a fly on the body to make it really like, bam.
Super spooky.
Yeah.
For look, this was really real.
The provided for scale.
You could also use copper plates to start, they started using some copper plates to like
reprint the images.
You also saw like the rise of the anatomical museum at this point with like, you could
walk into a spooky room
with a bunch of shelves with organs and jars
and things like that.
Well, we don't come that far.
Not that far.
The ones of the early 1800s have sometimes done away
with like the backgrounds
because like all these drawings that I'm talking about,
you can look at them, they all have like rolling hills
and trees and stuff behind these figures.
So they start to do away with that because like why do you need that?
Right.
You don't need that.
But they were still these idealized human figures.
They weren't really necessarily easy to follow.
A lot of it was just blocks of text next to a picture.
And they would describe everything next to the picture, but like labels weren't necessarily
used.
Oh, interesting.
So obviously we've made a lot of progress, but we're not where we need to be yet.
Right.
How do we get there?
Well, I'm going to tell you that Justin, but first let's go to the Billing Department.
Let's go.
The medicines, the medicines that I've skilled at my car before the mouth.
Now, said I think we're about to, uh, to finally go to a little progress here.
Well, and to be fair, Justin, we had made progress.
We definitely...
If you look from, like, old texts where there are no pictures to, like, the realization,
we need some pictures.
And here are some, like like crude human figures with some vague
organs inside to like some beautiful but disturbing images of live humans dancing around with their
organs popping out across the beautiful Greek countryside. And then finally we have like some actual anatomical drawings and figures.
This brings us to Grey's Anatomy,
not the TV show.
No, the one with the A, Grey.
What's the name?
Got it.
Right.
So we won't be talking much about the TV show.
I would think.
As much as, well, we've already talked about it plenty.
A good amount. So I had always assumed that Grey's anatomy was completely made by whoever
Grey was.
Guys name right on there. Henry Grey, right? Yes, Henry Grey.
I don't know why I knew that. That's weird. I didn't look at the nose. I know it seems
like I would have looked at the notes. I didn't. I've talked about it. I've listened.
Oh, hmm. Wow.
That's nice.
Cool.
Good husband.
Henry Gray, Dr. Henry Gray, was a young and up-and-coming anatomist at St.
George's.
He was kind of well to do upper-class guy.
He had a lot of financial support. He had a lot of charisma. He was well
liked. He was determined. He was out to make a name for himself and do whatever it took
to be something memorable to leave a legacy, right? Right. And he dressed really well and people like them.
And that's, it's important that you kind of get
who this guy is.
He had recently become a fellow of the Royal Society,
which was a big deal.
That was not necessarily something
that everybody could be.
And he had presented papers and things
in front of his fellow fellows.
And. Yeah I love that.
And was very well respected.
And he did have a lot of skill as an anatomist.
I don't mean to insinuate that he wasn't talented,
but he was talented and he knew it.
How about that?
I got wink.
He had been lauded recently for an excellent treatise
on the spleen.
There was something called the Asley Cooper Prize, which
was awarded every year to one of the, I don't even necessarily think it had to be a fellow,
it was one of the doctors. And it, they would give you like a topic, like everybody has to do a
treatise on this. And whoever does the best one gets this prize and it was like 300 pounds or something.
And so they were all challenged to do something on the spleen
and he wrote a very good treatise on the spleen
and his text was very good,
but he needed help with the drawings.
That wasn't necessarily his skill set, he could do them,
but he wanted somebody who was really good
and he had heard of a younger he wanted somebody who was really good,
and he had heard of a younger anatomist who was still in training, who was making some
money on the side, doing some drawings, doing some illustrations for various other doctors
and professors, and he reached out to him. And his name was Dr. Henry Van Dyke Carter,
also Henry.
Okay. He's easier to remember.
Yeah. So he talked to Dr. Carter and he said, you know, I would really like you to do
the illustrations for this thing I'm doing on the spleen.
And if you look back through the cool thing is Dr. Carter kept a huge diary
through most of his life about all of his daily ins and outs, everything that happened
to him.
So you can really, you get to know this guy a lot easier. I've been reading a book about it, the anatomist. And you, you really get to a feel for who
he was a lot easier. He was very self-conscious, he was very insecure. His family wasn't exactly thrilled
with what he was doing with his life. They didn't necessarily think he was going to be successful.
And he, he had a lot of, he was tortured by,
he had a very strong religious upbringing
and a very strong faith.
And he was constantly doubting whether or not
he was kind of fulfilling his duties on earth,
kind of being the best Henry he could be.
So this guy who's like riddled with self-esteem issues
who's desperate to succeed, he totally
idolizes Henry Gray.
He thinks he's just amazing.
And he wants to be just like him because he buys into everything that Henry Gray appears
to be.
So when he asks him, will you do some illustrations for my spleen treatise?
He's like, yes.
Yes.
For sure.
I love the jaw spleen.
So he does it.
Probably. It's like kind of round. It sure. I love the jaw spleen. So he does it. They probably is like kind
of round looks like a bean fight again. Yeah, but I bet his drawings were probably better
than that. I know. I'm just kind of guessing what a spleen pie looks like. I like that.
You just think most organs are kind of round and look like a bean. Basically yes. So
they the kidneys look way more like beans, but anyway. Well, there is a bean named after him since I didn't assume.
I mean, the whole bean after him.
The kidney looks like a bean.
You're trying to drop a dollar to me.
It must be so honored that they have a whole bean named after him.
Whole bean?
Wow.
What?
Oh, we do.
We're really honored.
The name Kidney Now.
Oh, we do.
It's filter all the toxins from your blood and keep you alive, but I'm glad we got a bean.
I'm gonna show my parents the liver that I really made it.
The Kidney's dad is the liver.
Oh, there's no liver bean.
No, the liver is the, is the kidney's dad.
Oh, okay, no, that's not liver.
Okay, where's the kidneys?
It is, look it up in your book.
Anyway, they nabbed the Asley Cooper prize that year.
And this was a huge deal.
This was a big, this was a big, like,
boom to his career reputation.
Like one of the top spleen drawing prizes
of public honor.
So with his money and his potential
and his spleen paper,
he decided that he should create
an anatomy text that was more accessible to students.
He wanted some book that he could write
based on his ability as an anatomist
and that all students would be able to afford.
He wanted it to be affordable and accessible
and kind of the new Bible of human anatomy.
So he persuaded Dr. Carter to help him out. And this was hard to do because
Gray still has not paid Carter for all the illustrations he did for his spleen paper. And so Carter at first
is like, I don't know, you can't owe me money and you promised me some stuff and you didn't really
follow through. And this is going to be a lot of work. And he's still working on his career.
He's still trying to get all of his licensing
and become a physician and work on his own.
And he's doing all these drawings
because everyone has noticed like,
wow, he's really good at this.
We gotta keep paying this, gotta do this.
But he's trying to pursue his own thing.
So it takes him a little while,
but he finally persuades him one
because I think Carter, as we know,
really like admired Gray.
And then the other reason is Gray finally promises,
like, look, I'll give you 10 pounds a month
if you'll do this.
She probably underpayment by today's standards,
like if you look at what he created.
And he's not probably not cutting men on royalties, I assume.
No, no, but he did need money to survive
and so he was willing to take it.
So 10 pounds a month, he took to start drawing the illustrations for this book and gray worked on the text
Carter's illustrations of course if you look at Gray's anatomy and you can find images from this everywhere
You can buy the book I own a copy. Most it's pretty heavy. Yes. It's huge. Most in medicine probably own a copy now
I don't know how
Practical it is nowadays. I don't because it's huge
You about to learn in med school like I seem like you had to have it. Well, you don't I didn't necessarily need it for med school But it's just a it feels like the thing you're supposed to have. Yeah, right. I got it
but he
His illustrations are beautiful. They have the shadowing and just the detail.
And I mean, they're really elegant, beautiful, exact drawings
that were probably unmatched at that point.
But the other thing that he did was that he labeled
the structures, like sometimes the words even like wind
around with the structure they're following in curve.
And this was hugely helpful as a student of anatomy,
I can tell you, to have the names on the pictures
as opposed to trying to read a big block of text
and then find what structure they're referencing.
Like this goes in period of this and goes lateral to this
and just put the name on it.
Grace text was also really great though.
Like it was really easy to follow and very descriptive
and made a lot of sense and just like,
it was a very logical progression of thought.
So I don't wanna undermine Gray.
He did a lot of hard work on this
and his skill was definitely felt,
but Carter's illustrations are equally important,
I think, to the understanding of anatomy.
Now at one point during this process,
Gray got asked by like a rich guy to come hang out on his yacht
for six months and be his personal doctor
and Gray took off for a while while Carter stayed at home,
working hard on his illustrations
and then also trying to pursue his career.
But eventually they finished it and they published it.
There was a lot of quibbling over the cover page
like the title page, because they
had the name of the book, which Gray had already decided what Gray's an ad me. And they
had Henry Gray. And then they have, and you can find this page. You can look up this original
page if you want to see the proof, because it's been uncovered. And like you can see where Henry Gray went, where Henry Van Dyck Carter's name was listed,
and drew through it, and said that he wanted the text
to be smaller, and also eliminated one of his titles,
so he wouldn't sound as impressive.
Oh man.
Yeah, so he went and like tried to physically minimize
the contributions of Carter.
Like you can find this where he has struck through and it's very clear.
Like, I don't, this is my book.
I know he did some pictures, but this is my book.
That's how I stop.
Carter went on to do other things with his life.
He, after he finished all of his training and he had achieved all of his,
of his titles and his credentials and licensing and everything,
he actually went to India and he worked on leprosy for a long time
wrote some really groundbreaking papers describing leprosy and and have the what caused it in the process of it and all that kind of stuff.
So he did a lot of stuff with his life after that.
Gray ended up essentially taking on a credit.
and it up essentially taking on a credit.
I mean, to this day, if you would ask me who did Grey's Anatomy, I would have thought it was like a joke.
Like, well, I mean, Grey.
I've never heard of Henry Van Dyk Carter
until I started researching this.
And then his name kind of rung about with the leprosy stuff,
but I certainly didn't know that he was the one
who drew all the pictures and grades in
Adam.
Because Henry Gray kind of took all the credit.
It got bigger over time because it was supposed to be like the end all be all of human anatomy
was this book.
So at one point it was over 2000 pages at its largest because the more we learn, the more
we added to it, right?
Each addition got bigger and bigger and bigger.
It has been kind of cold to make it a little more
acceptable, but I think it's still like 1500 pages.
A little lighter.
Yeah.
So it's still pretty dense.
The quality of the art is still amazing.
It's still unmatched for its time.
Most students nowadays probably use Dr. Frank Netters,
Atlas of Human Anatomy.
I know that was the thing for me in medical school.
Everybody had their netter. And the netter Atlas is it's really easy to use. It's smaller, of
course, it's not, it's not a giant. I mean, maybe I'll tablet now. Well, I'm sure, I'm sure you can
do that, but I used to book. I'm sure you can do that, but I mean, I went to, you know, it's been a
while back in the old days. Anyway, I used to book you know, it's been a while. Back in the old days.
Anyway, I used to book.
It was published in 1989.
He called it his personal sistine chapel.
It's kind of a cool guy.
Dr. Frank Netter.
He, my personal sistine chapel, he said something with podcasts, right?
Yeah, probably, hopefully.
Yeah.
Maybe it's this episode.
I don't know.
He just a little plug for Dr. Frank Netter.
Not only did he make this Atlas of Anatomy, which like all med students know the name Netter
because they have probably have a Netter.
He also like spent some of his time devoted to like fighting fake medicine.
Netter!
Cool, dude.
Anyway, that book was a little easier to follow and there's color illustrations which I think helped a little bit
I
Thought I would throw in one final thing as I'm thinking about like the progression of anatomical drawings because now you can find a ton of different
Alluses which are very detailed exact drawings and different parts of the human body and some that just focus on the brain or whatever
You can also if you take
Obviously if you go to medical school,
if you are a medical,
if someone in the medical profession,
you'll probably do dissecting,
which makes it easier to understand,
and you can also find pro sections,
which are actually like pre-dicecated parts
that you can look at.
I did some, I actually made some pro sections
when I was in medical school.
But I thought I would tack onto to that the body world's exhibit.
Oh, yeah, I guess for sure it's like the 3D version of what we're talking about.
That's right.
So Gunther Van Higgins produced the body world's exhibit, which he used a process called plastination, which he actually invented the process to preserve bodies in various forms,
like segmented in various ways.
So like dissected to various levels and slices
and you can make very thin sections that way
and display them.
Just remembering when we went to see this exhibit in New York with Riley, Riley was with
us and she was like, probably would have been six or seven at the time.
And we kept, we kept trying to reassure that was all fake.
And then we would say something that would hint to her that like, well, maybe it is in
fact real.
And then we have to double back like, no, no, no, totally fake.
And we kept her in suspense for literal years.
Yeah.
It was years that she, and like, and finally she looked at us and went, it was real, right?
It was real.
Like, you were lying to me.
So I wouldn't be freaked out.
But it was real.
This is three weeks ago.
She said.
Um, do you know though that before he made his, his body world's exhibit, which has some notoriety
because there's been some questions about how some of the bodies were obtained, he swears
that he got permission for all of them and that he knows where they all came from and that
they were all donated.
But there are other, there are other similar exhibits that have been called into question.
So anyway, there's obviously some controversy there.
But before he did that, he performed the first public autopsy in 170 years in London in 2002
to an audience of 500 people.
And it was then later that year shown on channel four.
Whoa, creepy.
No idea. There was a, there was a dis four. Whoa, creepy. No idea.
There was a, there was a dissection
and autopsy was shown on TV.
I imagine missed it, is that where we're at?
No, I'm not mad, I missed it.
I mean, I've done it, so I don't need to watch it on TV.
I'm just, I can't, I can't believe
that it was on TV, can you imagine that?
In England though, they put whatever on England.
But whatever.
Which one is channel four?
That's, that must be like the serious one, right?
Not BBC one.
Not BBC two.
It's not BBC three.
That's going to do for us folks.
Thank you so much for joining us.
If you want to say some more great illustrations of bodies, you should preorder the
solbona's book.
That's right. It's got a Y Ford slash the solbona's book, Taylor Smirl,
Sidious, Journey Gifted Illustrator,
has drawn plenty of bodies for you to feast your eyes on in there.
And that sounded weird.
I don't mean there.
I mean, it's for the sound as weird as it did.
But a bit.ly4 slash the solbona's book,
we're just a few weeks away. And those pre-orders
really do help because they all get folded into the first week sales and the first week sales
of a book are really, really important. So if you want to support us, please share that link around
and pick up a copy to call your local bookstore, period on Amazon, whatever. Just, uh, please thank you. If you're
a fan of our show, I think you're really going to love this book. We're really proud of
it. Um, thanks to taxpayers for the use of their song medicines as the intro and outro
of our program. Uh, and thanks to Max Fun Network for having us as part of their extended
podcasting family. And thank you to you, most of all, for listening and continuing to support
us. But until next week my
name is Justin McRoy and as always don't drill a hole in your head
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