ANATOMY

Foucault draws strongly on anatomy and its development over the centuries. By looking at some modern images we can grasp a sense of what he is interested in. But we can also look at the sort of images Foucault studied such as Leonardo Da Vinci's Vitruvia above. Look at the next three pictures which come from WEB sites devoted to anatomy





This first picture on the left is of an upper arm. While it certainly looks like a joint of meat perhaps the most important thing to notice is that everything stands in relation to something else. The muscles are bound by flesh and the parts identified by labels provide ways of delineating and defining the composition of the arm. The arm is these identifiable objects standing in fixed relations to each other. The arm is classified through small objects which surround other objects.






In this second picture we again have an upper arm but this time we seem to be staring straight into the cavity, peering thorugh the bone. The cavity is dark with nodes coming off it. It is a view of a amchine. My text is certainly non-scientific! This is intentional. I do not possess the scientific knowledge to speak about human anatomy whereas a doctor, a physiotherapist, a radiographer would possess this knowledge. Where I, and many of you, see objects which we have to describe in descriptive ways a 'trained eye' will see anatomical 'objects' functioning in relation to each other.

The third image is from the brain. Exactly the same points apply as above. But there is perhaps a compelling imagery about this picture. Here the brain itself is encased in a hard shell. Mind meets matter in ways that make Descartes notions less fanciful!








Now look at the following paintings from the work of Leonardo Da Vinci:
These two images from the Renaissance carry the same message as the images from modern anatomy. It was through thinking about anatomy that Foucault began to explore some of the principles of classification. We have an anatomical atlas as Foucault intends in Birth of the Clinic. What we have is a physical geometry of parts of the body. It is as Foucault says in the opening to the chapter ' Spaces and Classes', But this order of the solid, visible body is only one way - in all likelihood neither the first, nor the most fundamental - in which one spatialises disease. The rest of the chapter is concerned with the spatialisation of disease.
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