Queer Anatomies: Aesthetics and Desire in the Anatomical Image, 1700-1900

Anatomical drawings sit in an odd place between science and art. They were made to teach medical students and art academy pupils, yet they are often theatrical, playful and beautiful. Michael Sappol looks again at drawings from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and finds desire running through them, both in the eroticism of some illustrations and in the queerness of the men who made, used and collected them.

The book brings medical history, connoisseurship, queer studies and art history into conversation through close readings of work by Gautier d'Agoty, William Cheselden, Joseph Maclise and others. Its full-colour plates range from the brilliant to the barely competent, and the publisher notes that all of them repay attention. It is a frank and rewarding look at how the Victorians viewed the body when they thought nobody was watching.