Robert Carswell's Pathological Anatomy: Artistry and Visual Truth

Medical professionals do not devote much time to thinking about what anatomical illustrations accomplish and how they function as instruments of learning. At the same time, the history of anatomy is marked by strikingly illustrated treatises and atlases that are renowned for their images. Until the last three or four decades very little has been written about why these illustrations are so noteworthy as images and how, as images, they contributed to the growth of knowledge. The purpose of this chapter is to bring together art and epistemology in a discussion of how anatomical illustrations function as cognitive instruments in the development of knowledge and how they use the resources of the visual arts to do that persuasively. The focus of the discussion is Robert Carswell's Pathological Anatomy: Illustrations of the Elementary Forms of Disease, a landmark publication from 1838 in the history of pathology.