Preserving Monstrosities

November 06, 2018

Excerpt from "Beautiful Monsters", chapter 5 at Elegant Anatomy, Marieke M. A. Hendriksen


By the late eighteenth century, the making of anatomical preparations was still an act of selection, accentuation, and seeking beauty, even in the deformed and the ugly. By preserving monstrosities like these in preparations, and averting the immediate danger implied by the visceral disgust such specimens would provoke unpreserved, their makers shaped them into didactic instruments and purveyors of meaning.


Source: Elegant Anatomy, The Eighteenth-Century Leiden Anatomical Collections. Marieke M. A. Hendriksen (2015)

Source URL: https://brill.com/view/title/24846

ID: preserving-monstrosities

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