Printing the body

This bold boast dented Gautier’s reputation at the time because it was known by others in his trade to be a lie: Jacob Christoph Le Blon actually first developed the technique and taught it to Gautier, who waited until Le Blon died before trying to claim it as his own ingenious idea. Gautier’s real genius lay in finding the right audience to market the technique.

In 1745, Gautier aimed to make his prints the recommended texts for all students of medicine. He collaborated with Guichard Joseph Duverney, a lecturer in anatomy in Paris, and over the next few years they published three large anatomical texts with sumptuous illustrations using a complex and painstaking multiple-plate mezzotint method.

Clinical yet seductive

Gautier was no scientist, more an artist virtuoso, whose “science was more remarkable for its quirkiness” and reaction to his expensive publications was mixed. Not only did Gautier print colour in a three-dimensional, tonal way – only achieved through the repeated grinding of the mezzotint ‘rocker’ – but he used female models.

Compared to conventional male studies, Gautier’s figures must have ruffled medical feathers. His models were posed and almost seductive: he angled them to best display their inner workings, using the tonal differences of colour to enhance and enliven their softly lit bodies.

More: Mapping the body in Ayurvedic medicine.

Duverney clearly liked Gautier’s new approach, claiming in one of the books they collaborated on, ‘Myologie’, that: “Colour printing can nowhere make a greater contribution to scientific understanding than in anatomy.”

And Gautier’s publishing dynasty was testament to the success of his methods. His five sons continued their father’s publishing business in different guises until the 1770s, and the family workshop dominated the French medical publishing market.

A demand for precision

In time, the intricacies of layering colours via mezzotint proved too expensive for medical publications and unsuitable for the increasingly technical methods used in surgery. New medical approaches required new art.

By the early 19th century, the focus of anatomy had moved to the study of systems of membranes and tissues, and the recording of surgical feats. Pathological analysis became more detailed and the preparation of specimens became more precise.

Artistic expertise was crucial to medical dissertations on new methods of repairing or simply studying the body, and a more meticulous form of illustration was required.

So it is not surprising that renowned artists like Charles Turner moved into medical illustration. Turner was a mezzotint engraver by royal appointment and known more for his traditional portraits than his medical illustrations.

He collaborated with surgeon J B Carpue, in his ‘Account of Two Successful Operations for Restoring a Lost Nose from the Integument of the Forehead’, 1816, about a new surgical technique. For this essay, Turner tried his hand at the à la poupée method of printing to better depict the delicate tissue. This involved dabbing different coloured inks onto the metal plate using a wad of fabric to blend and create very detailed and accurate representations of colour and tone.

King George IV appreciated both Turner and Carpue, and they likely mixed within the same social circles. Commissioning the accomplished artist to illustrate his book undoubtedly helped the surgeon to promote his own work. Though the readership of such books was limited, they could be influential: Carpue’s essay revived a 16th-century technique for rhinoplasty.

Lesser-known artists also collaborated with medical publishers, particularly in the early 19th century. The name ‘J Stewart’ regularly appears on medical illustrations in the 1820s. Stewart’s illustrations, also coloured using the à la poupée technique, enhanced published lectures such as G J Guthrie’s ‘Lectures on the Operative Surgery of the Eye’ from 1827. Guthrie, assistant surgeon and lecturer at Westminster Hospital, performed innovative eye surgery, and would probably have known about Stewart’s previous work for the anatomist and illustrator John Bell.

Just as in Gautier’s time, finding the right audience for these vivid anatomical works was key to ensuring the time and effort taken to produce them was worthwhile. Some publishers, such as Burgess and Hill, based in London, used subscription fees to fund production costs and ensure there was a readership. Subscribers could view books in a dedicated ‘medical reading room and library’, a more practical ‘book club’ solution that would have benefited Gautier’s pricey publications some fifty years earlier.

A more modern technique

As techniques in printing and pathology altered during the 18th and early 19th centuries, so too did the relationship between artist and surgeon. Eventually, towards the mid-19th century, lithography (which used chemicals rather than scratching with a rocker to engrave a plate) replaced the older and more complex colour-printing processes, because it provided a cheaper alternative.

Lithograph printing was initially done by hand, such as in the case of Robert Carswell’s Pathological Anatomy, 1838, but it later became possible to create multiple printed impressions, as used to illustrate Joseph Maclise Surgical Anatomy, 1856: this was obviously much speedier and less expensive.

Until the advent of digital printing, lithography remained the dominant colouring process in medical illustration. Though today’s digital techniques are unlikely to depict sensual models with flayed bodies, the highest respect is still reserved for artists who, like Gautier and Turner, demonstrate ‘exceptional use of technique, understanding and interpretation of the subject’.