The Pregnant Female Body in Jan van Riemsdyk’s Art and William Hunter’s Science
Christine Slobogin
Bioethics Research Showcase
Before the eighteenth century, childbirth was the sacred domain of women. But what happened when male physicians began to produce discourse and create images regarding pregnancy and the female body? In the eighteenth century, men started to become midwives and inserted themselves into the female-dominated world of pregnancy and obstetrics, slowly transforming the field from a feminine and domestic concern into a masculine and scientific one.[1] As man-midwives became more common, “obstetrics” became the name used to describe a scientific field inhabited almost exclusively by men.[2] Moving obstetrics out of the female sphere of influence, male doctors gave social legitimacy to the field of childbirth as a respectable subject of study. Two particularly influential obstetric atlases helped to facilitate this medicalization of childbirth: the atlases of William Smellie[3] and William Hunter (dubbed The Man-Midwife by Horace Walpole).[4] William Smellie published his atlas in 1754 and William Hunter published his atlas, entitled Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata,in 1774.[5] This paper will focus on three images created for William Hunter’s atlas by the artist Jan van Riemsdyk, and how these illustrations, curated and influenced by Hunter, negotiate both the artistic and medical domains. These three images best exemplify the objective and misogynistic imagery that proliferated Hunter’s atlas. Working within the approach established by historians of medicine such as Ludmilla J. Jordanova, this paper will examine from a feminist and artistic perspective how the highly realist renderings by Riemsdyk contrast with earlier medical works by removing the human qualities from these pregnant women and emphasizing their inanimate status, thus focusing on the scientific purpose of each depiction.
William Hunter had a large curatorial role in deciding how his uterus images would look, and the depictions in his book combine an acute knowledge of science and anatomy with an intense focus on artistic and anatomical detail. He was concerned above all with the scientific accuracy of the images in Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata. According to Hunter, a detailed engraving could give the viewer an immediate comprehension of the anatomy.[6] In the Preface to his atlas he states:
The art of engraving supplies us, with what has been the great desideratum of the lovers of science, an universal language. Nay, it conveys clearer ideas of the most natural objects, than words can express; makes stronger impressions upon the mind; and to every person conversant with the subject, gives an immediate comprehension of what it represents.[7]
Because engraving could provide such a comprehensive, realistic, and scientific image, Hunter decided to use relatively little text in his atlas—a tactic that made Riemsdyk’s engravings the focus of the viewer’s attention.[8] Yet, while the focus was on the images, Hunter’s atlas successfully fixated on the science of pregnancy, not on the art of engraving. Hunter even failed to credit Riemsdyk in his preface, showing that artistry was of little importance to the physician.[9]
Hunter was first able to dissect a human gravid uterus in 1751, writing in his preface that
In the year 1751 the author met with the first favourable opportunity of examining, in the human species, what before he had been studying in brutes. A woman died suddenly, when very near the end of her pregnancy; the body was procured before any sensible putrefaction had begun; the season of the year was favourable to dissection; the injection of the blood-vessels proved successful; a very able painter, in this way, was found; every part was examined in the most public manner, and the truth was thereby well authenticated.[10]
Hunter states clearly that his artist (Riemsdyk) was present at the dissection, and that the images that he shows to the viewer are the absolute scientific truth. Even though he calls Riemsdyk “a very able painter”, he still does not mention him by name or give him explicit credit for the engravings in his introduction.
While he may not have been given due credit in Hunter’s preface, Riemsdyk was a talented engraver whose highly detailed style served Hunter’s goal to demonstrate every part of the dissected organ. In a letter to fellow physician William Cullen, Hunter exclaims at the effort that this faithfulness to nature requires: “But, good heavens! What pains is required to do anything with tolerable accuracy!”[11] William Cullen was a mentor of Hunter’s for whom he had been an apprentice in the 1730s, and he frequently wrote Cullen detailed letters of his projects and Riemsdyk’s depictions.[12] In these correspondences, Hunter often lauded the anatomical images for their ability to teach visually. Hunter made the curatorial decision to make these gravid uterus images as large as the pages in his atlas with the bulging uteri at the center of each page, making it easy for the viewer to focus on the organ of study and to observe every intricacy. By being provided with every detail of these uteri, the viewer of Hunter’s atlas is able to acquire every possible piece of knowledge about the represented anatomy.
Earlier anatomical illustrations of the sixteenth and seventeenth century were more concerned with the artistic portrayal of the dissections than with the scientific presentation and accuracy that so preoccupied Hunter. As Hunter writes in his Preface, “Anatomical figures are made in two very different ways; one is the simple portrait, in which the object is represented exactly as it was seen; the other is a representation of the object under such circumstances as were not actually seen, but conceived in the imagination.”[13] Hunter chose the former for his atlas. The older tradition of female dissection illustrations invoked Classical figures like the Venus Pudica, as seen in Juan Valverde de Amusco’s Gravida figure from Historia de la composicion del cuerpo humano, published in 1682 [Figure A]. Fulfilling the trope of the Venus Pudica figure, in Amusco’s illustration the woman’s hands coyly shield her genitals and one of her breasts. Amusco strays from the anatomical subject of the book by creating a Classical narrative and setting for his dissected figure. While the focus is still on the impregnated uterus, Amusco provides extraneous detail by portraying the woman’s entire body as well as the ground on which she stands. The effect is that the viewer looks upon the dissected body as a real human subject (even if it is an idealized Classical trope), and not as a scientific object.
Hunter and Riemsdyk diverge from these artistic conventions by stripping the figures down to the essential part: the organ of scientific focus. In contrast to Amusco’s Gravida, Riemsdyk’s drawing for Table XXVI [FigureB] utilizes drapery and a tightly cropped composition to focus the viewer’s attention on the bulging uterus, not allowing the viewer to observe any other part of the body. In fact, in [Figure B] but especially in [Figure C], Riemsdyk utilizes extreme perspective and shading to push the pregnant uterus into the viewer’s space.[14] Because he does not place his dissection in the context of a fully rendered, Classically beautiful female figure, Riemsdyk gives a clear focus, and it is on the object of scientific empirical observation, not on a modest Classical nude.[15] The opened book in [Figure B], possibly representing knowledge, still maintains some of the modesty seen in Amusco’s Gravida, while also distancing the viewer from the dissected figure.[16] While Riemsdyk prepared this drawing from one of Hunter’s dissections, it was not included in the final 1774 publication of the atlas. Perhaps Hunter believed that the book in front of the vagina conveyed too much Classical modesty and was too superfluous or imaginative. Clearly a leather-bound book would not have been placed in front of the vagina during a scientific dissection. [Figure C] and [Figure D] are much more in line with the rest of the images in Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata—the vaginas are exposed or cut and extraneous body parts are literally excluded from the image instead of just covered with drapery.
In all three of the images associated with Hunter’s obstetric atlas discussed in this paper (the drawing for Table XXVI [Figure B], the engraving for Table I [Figure C], and the image for Table VI [Figure D]), the female body is cropped at the top of the uterus, below the breast, as well as at the upper thigh. Hunter excludes anything extraneous to the science of obstetrics, such as the women’s faces or extremities, and by not showing these parts he strips them of their individuality. Hunter’s goal is to turn these women into scientific symbols, or “icons of various stages in gestational morphology”, not to exhibit particular cases he studied.[17]
While the figures in Figures [B], [C], and [D] were women in life, in death they are reduced to their uteri, vaginas, and upper thighs—all for the sake of Hunter’s scientific focus.
Riemsdyk’s style is so detailed and realistic, and his cropping so precise, that he distances the living individual viewing Hunter’s atlas from the once-human woman. In other words, the engravings present each figure as a cadaver, not as a woman. With the surface skin layers peeled back, Riemsdyk records every physical intricacy—every vein, bulge of fat, and each smooth or rough texture of skin. Even the buttocks hairs in [Figure D] are clearly visible in the full-page engraving. Hunter’s philosophy as a teacher was that each part had to be shown and described perfectly and completely, since this was the only way that a student could truly gain knowledge from the image.[18] This painstakingly thorough amount of concentrated detail dehumanizes the subject because it goes so far beyond what we perceive as an individualized person in everyday life. In the process of dissection, the uterus and surrounding organs have been scientifically separated from the human that this figure used to be. The gory intricacies of a person’s inner workings are not what the common viewer would think of as the definition of “human”.
Hunter does not endow the women in his illustrations with the four tenets of humanhood set forth by the bioethics pioneer Joseph F. Fletcher. These elements of humanity are: self-consciousness, human relationships, minimal intelligence, and sapient neocortical function.[19] Unlike the Classicized figure in [Figure A], the women in [Figure B], [Figure C], and [Figure D] have no heads or brains and are isolated from any semblance of their individualized personality and from other humans. Their isolations, along with the sole focus on the gravid uteri, dehumanizes the figures in the atlas’s illustrations, denying them of their “humanhood”, according to Fletcher’s definition.
Today, the medical world accepts that a physician must and should attend compassionately to this human side of a patient in order to give good care.[20] What these images reveal is that this was not necessarily the case in Hunter’s newly forged world of male-dominated obstetrics. Because of the field’s switch into the scientific realm and out of the domestic realm, the “objective” data was much more important than the emotional and human data upon which non-surgical female midwives focused. Hunter and Riemsdyk removed themselves and the viewers of their atlas from the human aspects of the dissected women. Unlike the typical modern doctor’s point of view that “Illness is a drama, and the patient is the center of that drama”, Hunter focused above all on the quality and quantity of the information that could be gleaned from these dissection processes and their images.[21]
Hunter and Riemsdyk’s stylistic choices accent the dichotomy between life and death, emphasizing that the figure in each engraving is truly deceased. The women in the gravid uteri images of [Figure B], [Figure C], and [Figure D] are treated like meat at a butcher’s shop, with the dissector as the one who wields the meat cleaver. Riemsdyk’s lifelike and detailed portrayal of the organs as living and working contrasts with the body’s obvious expiration. Riemsdyk’s depictions of shiny and functioning organs was made possible by Hunter’s dissections, which included injecting the defunct blood vessels with wax.[22] For example, the small and spindly vessels to the right of the bulging uterus in [Figure C] are much more lifelike than they would have appeared if left to the natural course of decomposition during and after the dissection. According to Jordanova, this allows for an obvious comparison with meat since, like these bodies, meat at the market is caught “between the full vitality of life and the total decay of death.”[23] The women on these dissection tables, like animal meat to be sold and eaten, have passed into death, and yet still serve a vital purpose. For meat, that purpose is to sustain human life; for these women, the purpose is to sustain the growth of scientific knowledge.
The most striking parallel between the dissected woman and meat appears in [Figure D]. In [Figure B] and [Figure C], Riemsdyk included drapery that covers the body below the upper thigh. In [Figure D], as Hunter explains, “all the upper part of the bladder is cut away, in order to shew the situation of the child’s head in the lower part of the womb. All the forepart, both of the womb and of the secondines, (which included the placenta) is removed. The navel-string is cut, tied, and turned to the left side, over the edge of the womb.”[24] The language used by Hunter to outline his process mimics actions such as “cut” that would be used to describe what one does to meat.
In [Figure D], there is neither drapery nor any visible body part below the upper thigh. This figure is truncated violently, and the viewer of Hunter’s atlas plainly sees the cross-section of the thigh. The way in which the artist presents these cutaway sections to the viewer is obviously reminiscent of two slabs of raw meat. This imagery underscores that these women are butchered, deceased beings that only exist in their engraved form to be observed for learning. Hunter lived by the mantra that one must dissect the dead to understand the living, writing to the Earl of Bute in 1763 that, “without practice [of dissection], there can be no great share of real and useful knowledge.”[25]
Especially in the image of the full term fetus [Figure D], there is a stark juxtaposition between life and death.[26] While each of the figures in Hunter’s atlas depicts a uterus that contains a human fetus, it is only in [Figure D] that the dissection includes a cutting-away of the front-facing skin layer of the uterus to reveal a fully developed fetus at nine months. The fetus is perfectly and fully formed, and Riemsdyk meticulously shows each strand of hair, each wrinkle, and each twist of the umbilical cord. Again in the text accompanying this image, Hunter speaks to the precise nature of engraving that shows the absolute truth of this dissection: “Every part is represented just as it was found; not so much as one joint of a finger having been moved.”[27] The umbilical cord, shining with the baby’s lifeblood, and the fetus’s skin, also shining, create a much more lifelike figure than that of the dissected woman—barely more than a carrier for the child—that surrounds the fetus.[28] In obstetrics at the time, it was institutionally accepted that the fetus, not the mother, was the primary patient.[29] The focus is not on the body of the pregnant woman nor on the art image, but rather on the fetus. Riemsdyk’s artistic form is still accurate and highly detailed, but the artist portrays this fetus in an aestheticized manner. New life is the beautiful ideal, while the woman who surrounds this new beginning is dead and lifeless.
In Hunter’s Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata, Riemsdyk’s highly detailed engraving style serves Hunter’s scientific purpose by de-emphasizing the art of the atlas and emphasizing the medical meaning of each image, while simultaneously dehumanizing the dissected female subject. While clearly made with artistic precision and skill, the utmost purpose of the plates in the atlas is to provide the viewer with an unbiased and “objective” view into the world of obstetrics. Hunter clearly believed that Riemsdyk’s pictures served this purpose, saying of one, “I believe it will be found the finest anatomical figure that ever was done.”[30] Hunter and Riemsdyk decided to strip away the elements of humanity from the dissected women and focus completely on the bulging uteri and organs directly associated with pregnancy. Riemsdyk’s drawing and engravings also focus on the deceased status of the figures by rendering them as slabs of meat, serving as objects of dissection, and by starkly contrasting the truncated body in [Figure D] with the fully formed and lifelike fetus within. Overall, the artistic detail in Riemsdyk’s engravings allow for the medical purpose to prevail in Hunter’s atlas. The artistic and the medical work together to create a methodical book of the highest practical and scientific use.