Anatomy theater

“ The theater has a voice as well, but it lingers on the ear of time with a different music. The Roman theater at Arles seemed to me one of the most charming and touching ruins I had ever beheld; I took a particular fancy to it. It is less than a skeleton--the arena may be called a skeleton; for it consists only of half a dozen bones. The traces of the row of columns which formed the scene--the permanent back-scene--remain; two marble pillars--I just mentioned them--are upright, with a fragment of their entablature. ”

“ They came to a door marked Anatomy Theatre. Philip found that there were a good many people already there. The seats were arranged in tiers, and just as Philip entered an attendant came in, put a glass of water on the table in the well of the lecture-room and then brought in a pelvis and two thigh-bones, right and left. More men entered and took their seats and by eleven the theatre was fairly full. There were about sixty students. ”

“ The Museum, he said, had "only a beginning of such an anatomical collection as I have indicated is desirable * * *. We are accustomed to think that human anatomy is exhausted as a field for original research," a view to which the speaker did not subscribe. "There is ample material and scope for original work for half a dozen skilled anatomists for many years to come to supply the demands of this museum for illustrations of human morphology * * *," he added. ”

“ The anatomical mechanism of the human body, considered as a whole, or divisible into regions, forms a study so closely bearing upon practice, that the surgeon, if he be not also a mechanician, and fully capable of making his anatomical knowledge suit with the common principles of mechanics, while devising methods for furthering the efforts, of Nature curatively, may be said to have studied anatomy to little or no purpose. ”

“ Anatomy has been ever with me a favourite branch of my profession; and when a student, I never let slip an opportunity, time and material permitting, to improve myself in it by dissection. It was a passion with me; and whenever I met with a person extremely emaciated or finely developed, my anatomical eye would scan their proportions, and instead of paying them the usual courtesies of life, I would be thinking what glorious subjects they would be for museum preparations or dissection ”

“ In the big screen spectacles all of the men seem gigantic, with tremendous, muscular torsos. Even the little guys look like titan figures, fifty or a hundred times as large as they seem outside the theater. ”

“ In their anatomical hall is the bust of a woman, Professor of Anatomy. In Art they have had Properzia di Rossi, Elizabetta Sirani, Lavinia Fontana, and delight to give their works a conspicuous place. ”

“ Sculptors should attend anatomical dissections; should learn the structure of the human frame, and the appearance of the muscles under the various conditions to which circumstances may subject them. Indeed the study of anatomy is essential to success. ”

“ Every effort was made to insure the punctual attendance at the public or compulsory anatomies, for it was enacted in 1572 that every man of the Company using the mystery or faculty of surgery, be he freeman, foreigner, or alien stranger, shall come unto the Anatomy lecture, being by the beadle warned thereto. ”

“ The human hand has a language of its own. While the tongue demonstrates the thought through the word, the hand realizes and renders visible the thought through the work. This organ, therefore, by whose fitness of form the mind declares its own entity in nature, by the invention and creation of the thing, which is, as it were, the mind’s autograph, claims a high interest in surgical anatomy ”

“ Before he married Saskia he had painted a remarkable picture, named the "School of Anatomy." It represents a great anatomist, the friend of Rembrandt--Nicholaus Tulp,--and a group of physicians who were members of the Guild of Surgeons of Amsterdam. It is so wonderful a picture that even the dead man, who is being used as a subject by the anatomist, does not too greatly disturb us as we look upon him. The thoughtful, interested faces of the surgeons are so strong that we half lose ourselves in their feeling, and forget to start in repulsion at sight of the dead body. ”

“ Two other organic sciences, those of anatomy and physiology, have added enormously to our knowledge of animated nature. Anatomy, which is of high practical importance from its relation to surgery, is a science of ancient origin, many important facts concerning it having been discovered by the physicians of old Greece and Rome. This study continued during later centuries, and by the opening of the nineteenth the gross anatomy of the human frame was fairly well known, and many facts in its finer anatomy had been traced. ”

“ How often we hear the remark that contrapuntal treatment is best suited to the organ! True; but how many reflect that the organ, so to speak, first dictated counterpoint to the world? An influence, which (the free forms being derived from the stricter) is carried clear down into the realm of Italian opera, i.e., when it is good of its kind. Is not, then, this influence, which the organ has indisputably exerted upon not merely its own literature, but the musical literature at large, an all-sufficient proof of its right to the royal title? ”

“ With all its dignity, the University gave me the horrors as a building. I am glad that I had nothing to learn in it. One cannot imagine such a narrow compass for a school, even though, as the student of a German university, one may have suffered a great deal on the benches of the auditorium. The anatomical theatre is a perfect model of the art of pressing students together. The audience are piled one above another in a tall, pointed funnel. They look down upon the narrow space where the table stands ”

“ Thus, anatomy is said to be necessary ‘to represent the bones, muscles tendons, and veins, as they appear on the surface of the human body;’ so that it is to be presumed, that the anatomist, when he has with his knife and instruments laid bare the internal structure of the body, sees at a glance what he did not before see; but that the artist, after poring over them all his life, is blind to the external appearance of veins, muscles, &c., till the seeing what is concealed under the skin enables him for the first time to see what appears through it. ”

“ The form of the limbs, as affected by pressure or action, and the general sway of the body, are preserved with the most consummate mastery. We should prefer this statue as a model for forming the style of the student to the Apollo, which strikes us as having something of a theatrical appearance, or to the Hercules, in which there is an ostentatious and over-laboured display of anatomy. ”

“ From this room of anatomy you are conducted to the room of histology, in which the eye is aided by powerful microscopes and made acquainted with the smallest arteries of the human body, which in life are of the greatest known importance, remembering that in the room of histology you are still studying anatomy, and what that machinery can and does execute every day, hour, and minute of life. ”

“ His fine physique was often useful in the pre-anæsthetic days, when a patient’s nerve gave way at the last moment at the sight of the crowded theatre and the operating-table with its straps. It is said that on one occasion a patient, losing his courage at the last moment, rushed shrieking down the long corridor of the hospital, with Liston at his heels. The man locked himself in a room, but the surgeon with his shoulder broke in the door, and half-dragged half-carried the poor wretch back to the operating theatre, where the operation for stone was successfully performed. ”

“ The anatomy of the scalpel and the amphitheatre was, then, becoming an exhausted branch of investigation. But during the present century the study of the human body has changed its old aspect, and become fertile in new observations. ”

“ The result will be an added lustre to the made-up eye, a seeming gain in brilliancy; but now, watching your reflection all the time, move slowly backward from the glass, and an odd thing will happen, that made-up eye will gradually grow smaller and smaller, until, at a distance much less than that of the auditorium, it will really look more like a round black hole than anything else, and will be absolutely without expression. You have an admirable stage eye—an actor's eye, sensitive, expressive, well opened, it's a pity to spoil it with a load of blacking. ”

“ The Place is a regular theater-in-the-round with the Void for an audience, the Void's gray hardly disturbed by the screens masking Surgery (Ugh!) , Refresher and Stores. Between the last two are the bar and kitchen and Beau's piano. Between Surgery and the sector where the Door usually appears are the shelves and taborets of the Art Gallery. The control divan is stage center. Spaced around at a fair distance are six big low couches—one with its curtains now shooting up into the gray—and a few small tables. ”

“ The marble arm-chairs were assigned to priests, whose names are carved upon them. In the theater I saw one high arm-chair, like a throne, with lion's feet. This is Roman, and was the seat of a Roman general. The fronts of the seats are pierced with small holes, which allow the rain-water to escape. Below the stage there are some sculptured figures, most of them headless. One which is not is a very striking and powerful, though almost sinister, old man, in a crouching posture. ”

“ Ordinarily, it would be presumed that any such proposition from an artist could scarcely be taken seriously in the sense of a scientific text-book to represent real contributions to anatomy as a science, though it might, of course, be valuable for artists. In recent years, however, the republication of the sketches of his dissections shows that Leonardo da Vinci might have written a very wonderful textbook of anatomy and that his plates are still valuable for the study of professed anatomists. ”

“ There can be no more striking proof of the divinity of design than by such revelations as anatomical science everywhere manifests in facts such as this—viz., that each organ serves in most cases a double, and in many a triple purpose, in the animal economy. ”

“ The novel yields its attraction to the slightly stronger realism of the medical treatise, and the picture galleries have the air of a pathological museum. It is suggested that the theatres, if they want to hold their own, must represent critical operations in a thoroughly realistic manner on the stage. ”

“ The subject of our study, whichever it happen to be, may appear exhausted of all interest, and the promise of valuable novelty, owing to two reasons:—It may be, like descriptive human anatomy, so cold, poor and sterile in its own nature, and so barren of product, that it will be impossible for even the genius of Promethean fire to warm it ”

“ An anatomical theatre being appended to the University of Dublin, whenever I heard of a fresh subject, or remarkable corpse, being obtained for dissection, I frequently attended the lectures, and many were the beauteous women and fine young fellows then carved into scraps and joints pro bono publico. ”

“ The electrical organ at the Metropolitan Opera House is interesting. The organ itself is fixed in the first fly gallery on the right, but it may be played [264] from any part of the stage. At the extreme right of the stage is the organ trap. When it is wished to use the organ either for rehearsal or for a performance, the keyboard is raised by the trap and carried to any part of the stage, a large cable carrying the wire which runs up to the organ. This arrangement gives great satisfaction.
Every precaution is taken to guard against fire, which once played such havoc with the Opera House. ”

“ Thus the adventure which provided the theatre of anatomy with the means of keeping a few students at hard work in one of the most important departments of human knowledge, had probably occasioned more than one night of fierce dissipation, and produced scenes which would have considerably astonished the good old aunts, deprecating the exhausting labours of their virtuous nephews in the nasty hospitals and that horrid dissecting-room. ”

“ Physiology.—The body, face, and arms of the opera-dancer present no peculiarities above the rest of his species; and it is to his lower extremities alone that we must look for distinguishing features. As our researches extend downwards from head to foot, the first thing that strikes us is a protuberance of the ante-occipital membranes, so great as to present a back view that describes two sides of a scalene triangle, the apex of which projects posteriorly nearly half way down the figure. ”

“ Processes of bone-grafting have been thrown upon the screen. Serial radiographs of the stomach showing all the stages of digestion have been revealed to an audience of surgeons. One professor of neurology uses twenty-five thousand feet of cinema film in teaching and illustrating nervous and mental diseases. Even the blood has not escaped the cinema-worker’s relentless probing. ”

“ It is a background more enveloping and animating than the ballroom of Maria Theresa. It is a background that accords with every mood, and is itself a unity.
The other problem is a psychological and a physical problem, the problem of life-principles in art. In the beginning the theater was masculine. Its essence was a thrust. The phallus was borne in the processional ritual at the opening of the Theater of Dionysus each spring; and its presence was significant. The greatest and the healthiest of the theaters have always plunged their actors into the midst of the audience. ”