Information Professionals at the Crossroads of the Enlightenment: <i>A Critical Review of the Pernkopf Controversy</i>

Abstract

IntroductionInformation professionals have always been critical servants of Enlightenment project. The unpredictable situations they encounter in their every day dealings with information seekers make them acutely aware of historically limited scope of some of principles under which they operate. They are critical to extent that they play an instrumental role in helping to implement their tenets in their daily tasks, and they are also critical in etymological sense to extent that their work involves carrying out reflective and deliberative actions. Information professionals contribute to dissemination of knowledge and implementation of principles and guidelines that ensure sharing of human intellectual goods. At same time, their daily contact with information seekers such as library patrons brings them face to face with new, unheard of, and unpredictable situations.With no precedents to guide them, and caught between their willingness to serve greatest number of information seekers and their acute sense of justice, information professionals sometimes feel at loss and can only make humble but firm suggestions to appropriate institutions as to how rules and principles should be modified, or new ones created to accommodate those situations. This leads to third role of information professionals: that of initiators of guiding principles.The ultimate purpose of this paper is to underscore extent to which controversy surrounding one work, Pernkopf 's Atlas of Topographical and Applied Human Anatomy, made an important contribution to this unfinished and unfinishable project that subtends goals of information profession as outlined above. In first part we describe atlas and circumstances that made it one of most controversial works in science. In second part, we present main positions developed within field of information science on fundamental question of what to do with tainted work. Through comparative analysis of protagonists' arguments, we profile ethical concerns that have always been at core of Enlightenment project. In so doing we hope to show just how pivotal, albeit Sisyphean in appearance, is role of information professional.What Is Pernkopf's Atlas?The Atlas is an anatomy book created during World War II by Edward Pernkopf, an Austrian physician and Dean of Faculty of Medicine at University of Vienna, under title Atlas der topogaphischen und angewandten Anatomie des Menschen. The English translation in two volumes was first published in 1963-64 by W. B. Sanders. The second revised edition was published in 1 998 by Urban & Schwarzenberg. The first volume is dedicated to anatomy of head and neck, and second volume to anatomy of thorax, abdomen, and extremities. Both volumes are richly illustrated. They contain more than 800 detailed paintings of dissections (Israel and Seidelman, 1996). The atlas was considered classic of human anatomy and much sought-after textbook until circumstances of its production were publicized by American scholars in eighties. Prior to that revelation atlas was hailed as work of art. Even today most vehement critics of Pernkopf 's ideas acknowledge quality of content as well as form of work. Daniela Angetter (2002) considers atlas a work that is still consulted worldwide today. The unprecedented and unparalleled quality of anatomical paintings book contains also makes it an outstanding work of art of which D.S. Cutler notes, the illustrations of human dissections painted under Pernkopf 's direction are most likely greatest collection of anatomic paintings that will ever be produced (1997, 1122). Commenting on originality of color paintings, David J. Williams (1998) states that Pernkopf 's atlas represents the pinnacle of color anatomic representations and he concludes that atlas constitutes the standard by which all other works are measured (1). …