ABSTRACT
Joseph Wright’s distinctive manner of treating light pictorially was closely connected with his exploration of the ways in which human beings understand nature, their attitudes to knowledge and the gender differences involved. Family and gender are ideological constructs as well as powerful human experiences, and medicine has played a central role in constructing familial relationships, especially that between mother and child – this role was particularly prominent in the eighteenth century. All living things were created at the beginning, later generations being enclosed within earlier ones. The vitality of generation appears in William Hunter’s Gravid Uterus not as force or energy but in the fullness and texture of the internal organs. To the extent that Hunter’s atlas can be labelled ‘medical’, commentators tend to disregard the other elements it contains. Hunter made aesthetic claims for his atlas just as J. Laskey did when he described the Hunterian Museum in Glasgow.
