1747

Publication of Bernhard Albinus’s (Leyden anatomist) Tabulae sceleti et musculorum corporis hominis [Tables of the Skelton and Muscles of the Human Body], which exemplifies anatomical atlases “of the idealized sort,” in which, as per pre-late-19th-century naturalism, the atlas provides “pictures of an ideal skeleton, which may or may not be realized in nature, and of which this particular skeleton is at best an approximation” (Daston & Galison, 90). “Albinus and other idealizing atlas makers did not hesitate to offer pictures of objects they had never laid eyes upon, but in the interest of truth to nature rather than in violation of it” (91). By contrast, “atlases of characteristic images” presented individual cases as exemplary and illustrative of broader classes and causal processes, e.g., Morel’s Traité des dégénérescences physiques, intellectuelles, et morales de l’espece humaine (1857). In such atlases “Individual depiction by no means precluded essentialist typologies, even in pathology” e.g., in Gottlieb Gluge’s Atlas of Pathological Histology (1853), the individuals “nonetheless pointed beyond variability to an underlying type of which they were characteristic, setting strict limits to deviations” (95).