The Anatomy Lesson

The Anatomy Lesson: Unveiling the Fasciculus Medicinae is a comprehensive artistic, poetic, and scholarly response to the 1495 Fasciculus Medicinae, the first printed book with anatomical illustrations. The artist, Joyce Cutler-Shaw, has been Artist-in-Residence at the School of Medicine, University of California, San Diego since 1991. The book was sparked by her invitation to participate in the 1995 Science and the Artist’s Book exhibition, sponsored by the Smithsonian Institute and the WPA.

New commentaries by invited scholars such as Katharine Park, Peter Murray Jones, and Barbara Maria Stafford provide rich and varied contexts for interpreting the artist’s work vis-à-vis the medieval woodcuts and sample pages of Latin text, reproduced full size. Introduction and editorial assistance is by Dr. William Shupbach, The Wellcome Library, London. Each of the ten main sections includes a four-page spread that opens to forty inches wide, and features a photogravure of Cutler-Shaw’s drawing, printed by Jon Goodman. The rest is printed letterpress in black onto handmade white paper. Text faces are Adobe Poetica and Minion. Concertina binding co-designed with Daniel E. Kelm and Joyce Cutler-Shaw, produced at The Wide Awake Garage; hologram on front cover, produced by DuPont Authentication Systems, features an early eighteenth-century brass lancet. Housed in a custom-made, engraved stainless steel box. Twenty pages of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia copy of the 1495 Fasciculus Medicinae were reproduced for this volume. Editing, design, and letterpress printing by Robin Price. Signed by Cutler-Shaw and Price. Out of print.

14 x 10 x 1.5 inches; 96 pages; edition of 50 [2004]