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I visited the Flesh and Bones: The Art of Anatomy exhibit at the ArtScience museum in Singapore. What still strikes me is the timelines it took to arrive at our current understanding of anatomy. It took centuries of painstaking and socially subversive work to produce the modern body of knowledge. Plenty of it started as art before mutating into science.
The beautiful centuries-old sketches of the human calf muscles were worth the admission price. It blew my mind to imagine the talent and capacities that produced those during that era. The sketch of the calf muscles in great detail from the early 1700’s still holds up today. It was a brilliant work of science. But the people who produced this body of work were thought of as artists during their time. Not as scientists. But artists.
What I found fascinating was the number of minds at work to decode the human anatomy between 1500-1800. It was a problem that took plenty of brains, ingenuity and talent to fully crack the problem and produce a body of knowledge we build on today. Their contribution to what would lead to Gray’s seminal work on anatomy is significant. It would change biology and medical science forever. But it started as art. And evolved into science.
What happened to Da Vinci’s study of the human heart is even more tragic. I remember reading Isaacson’s biography and being blown away by how Da Vinci recreated an ox heart to understand how the heart valves prevent backflow of blood due to the flow of blood. It’s fluid dynamics. And he created a glass model to study this. The Isaacson biography dives into the experiment involving pouring a suspension of grass seeds and water into the structure to understand how the valves worked. And when Da Vinci died, this amazing insight was lost to the world till the late 20th century. They had his sketches too.
The exhibit also had one of the first artificial heart pumps, a device to conduct lobotomies (terrifying) and a bionic eye device. Modern medicine is a work in progress. And one that builds on centuries of not just science. But art too. Modern anatomy has its roots in art. And that’s what surprised me.
Those artists were arguably scientists of their time. Dispassionate chroniclers of the human body who entirely transformed our understanding of how it works. And it took dozens of people over centuries to make it happen.