ABSTRACT
This chapter explains the concept of anatomopoeia to refer to the processes involved in making and growing anatomical knowledge, which cut across any clear distinctions between the mental and the material, the organic and the artefactual. The concept of anatomopoeia partly from the nineteenth-century use of the term 'skeletopoeia': 'that part of practical anatomy which treats of the preparation of bones, and the construction of skeletons'. To examine the dynamics of anatomopoeia as both making and growing focus on one practitioner, David Hugh Tompsett at the Royal College of Surgeons of England (RCS), in London. Producing over 150 models during his career, Tompsett worked with colleagues at the RCS to rebuild this institution's museum collections after the bombing during the Second World War. Tompsett's models were DIY in that they were improvised in a hands-on experimental way with mundane materials, but he did not, however, do this work by himself.
