ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the genealogy of the anatomical images used in patient counselling and consumer health education and the assumptions about embodied life that they encode. Anatomical images may appear neutral by reason of their "empirical" content and clinical context, but in fact they assert their values through a visual rhetoric. The chapter looks at two related and particularly charged aspects of anatomical illustration: representations of female anatomy and the presumption of normative sexual dimorphism. It analyses of visual representations of the body from feminist, anatomical, bioethical, historical, artistic, clinical, and activist viewpoints, to name only a sample of the interests that converge on this topic. Contemporary imaging technology allows the detailed, interior observation of living bodies, but anatomical science for most of its history has been bound up with the exploration of dead bodies. Michael Sappol traces a trend toward increasing austerity in the aesthetics and meanings of anatomical conventions from Vesalius to the present.
