Teaching the Anatomical Body in Seventeenth-Century London

Abstract

This article addresses the pedagogical practices of the Worshipful Company of Barber-Surgeons of London during the seventeenth century. As artisans—trained by apprenticeship—their teaching and learning was embedded in the embodied actions performed in their anatomy theatre. The Barber-Surgeons held regular public anatomies for the benefit and ‘greater learning’ of the masters and apprentices of the Company, performed on the bodies of up to four felons per annum granted to them by the sovereign. The space in which these anatomies were performed and the practices by which that knowledge was imparted, shaped the ways in which the human body was understood—in a slow and uneven process—by which the body was subjected to a process of abstraction.