Physis Riv Int Stor Sci. 1994 ; 31(3): 731-69.

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Carlino A.

Istituto Universitario Europeo, Firenze.

Anatomical fugitive sheets are of great interest, as a typographical genre, not only for the history of printing and the history of medicine, but also, more generally, for the history of culture as a whole. They were published as folio woodcuts (more rarely engravings) in Germany, France, Italy, England and the Netherlands from the end of the XVth centkury to the mid XVIIIth century. These sheets contain a figure representing the human body (male and female) and a text describing in a concise and quite rough way the elements of the illustration. What is unusual about these sheets is that the trunk of the figures and some of the internal organs can be lifted up or peeled away, like some contemporary books for children. The figures and some internal parts are very often coloured. Judging from the number of editions (I have found 15 editions published between 1538 and 1540!), anatomical sheets met with a huge commercial success and a very wide circulation indeed. Students of the faculties of medicine and philosophy and barber-surgeons were the more obvious consumers. Students would use them as aids to memory to accompany non-illustrated medical books; barbers to grasp some basic notions of the human body, useful for the practice of phlebotomy. They could be purchased in bookshops, but they were more likely to have been sold in market places or around the University where many colporteurs displayed their cheap prints and booklets. I shall argue, however, that anatomical fugitive sheets have also been produced for and used by a non-professional public, literate but not highly educated, unable to read Latin and more used to learning from images rather than from the written word. A public that was eager to discover the inner secrets of the bodily self, the divine machine that we inhabit. From a scientific point of view anatomical fugitive sheets often reveal errors and differences compared to academic textual and iconographic material on the same subject. The discrepancy was evident from the very first editions, although a very limited number of sheets were published in corrected and updated editions to follow medical research in universities. In many ways, anatomical fugitive sheets are exceptional documents through which one can measure the gap between academic knowledge and popularization and identify the iconographic and textual strategies used in order to break the academic monopoly on scientific discourses. Through fugitive sheets, anatomical knowledge partially lost its strictly scientific connotations and was adapted to a multiplicity of often quite unexpected uses.