1Around 1800, anatomical models for medical research and teaching were not yet mass-produced, but made in small numbers, from a variety of materials. We know that medical men frequently collaborated with visual artists and craftsmen to realize such models, and that the difference between medical man and artisan was sometimes hard to discern. However, we know very little about these collaborations – whether these people thought of themselves as distinct groups of professionals, and how they valued, acquired, and appropriated each other’s knowledge and skills.

2This chapter presents two case studies, one in Edinburgh and one in Philadelphia, to examine the norms and modes of knowledge-production in the realm of anatomical model-making around 1800. 1 Many men who identified primarily as natural philosophers, physicians, or anatomists had considerable creative skills which they actively developed, and those making a living through the production of images and objects pursued and possessed extensive anatomical knowledge. In medicine, where sensory perception, practical skill, and manual dexterity were traditionally highly valued, there was a long history of collaboration with visual artists. It was the combined knowledge and skills of localised networks of this kind, linking anatomists and artists, that informed the conception and production of anatomical models. I suggest that this range of modes of collaboration structured the ways in which political, social, and cultural authorities such as academies of art and science bestowed status and value, and so shaped anatomical knowledge.

Organizing anatomical knowledge: the role of visual aids

3It has long been known that anatomists and visual artists worked closely together in the production of anatomical atlases in early modern Europe, and that anatomists and other medical men learned drawing techniques to illustrate their own work. We have an excellent corpus of literature on the history of anatomical museums and preparations.2 Anatomical drawing and illustrations have been studied, and an impressive corpus on anatomical wax models has been published.3 Yet we know little about how other three-dimensional modelling techniques, such as plaster casting and wood sculpting, were used to organize and transmit anatomical knowledge. Three-dimensional anatomical models were produced at least from the Renaissance onwards. However, these were primarily a means for male physicians to establish authority on women’s health and had a limited role in medical research and teaching.4 With the institutionalization of medical research and teaching, the role of three-dimensional models in the organization of anatomical knowledge also changed profoundly, particularly from the eighteenth century onwards.

4During the last decades of the seventeenth century, anatomists in the Low Countries and elsewhere successfully developed new techniques for the preservation of anatomical preparations, such as injection with coloured wax masses and quicksilver mixtures, as well as preservation fluids. This led to a huge growth of collections of anatomical preparations, both in institutions such as universities and in privately owned collections. Meanwhile, especially in Italy and the German-speaking lands, anatomists also started to create anatomical models from wax with the help of artists who previously mostly made votive offerings and religious scenes in wax.

5For as long as anatomists and artists have worked together, they have disagreed about the ways in which visual aids could be used to organize knowledge, for example to what extent drawings, models or casts should be idealized, simplified or embellished. While the Dutch anatomist Bernard Siegfried Albinus (1697-1770) in the mid-eighteenth century instructed his draftsman to correct asymmetries in his drawings of the human skeleton, Scottish anatomist William Hunter (1718–1783) occasionally clashed with his draftsman Jan van Rymsdyk because he felt he idealized his drawings too much.5 Scottish anatomist and surgeon John Bell (1763–1820) complained in 1804 of ‘a continual struggle between the painter and the anatomist; one striving for elegance of form, the other insisting upon accuracy of representation.’6 However, what we know about the working relations between medical men and visual artists is mostly about the creation of drawings and engravings – the illustration of anatomical books. We hardly know anything of the cooperation between these two groups when it comes to other forms of visualization, such as the creation of plaster casts and wooden models.

6Studying and comparing the working relations between medical men and visual artists creating three-dimensional models in two different cities on opposite sides of the Atlantic around 1800 is valuable for various reasons. First, it offers a better understanding of these working relations. Comparing Edinburgh and Philadelphia in this respect is particularly useful because they were both anglophone centres of medical research and instruction at the time – one established, the other emerging. The differences and similarities in practices, materials, and relations connected to the production of models in the two cities potentially offers insights in the role of institutional and social structures, as well as in the availability of materials, literature, and expertise, and may possibly unearth connections between the two locations.

Plaster: Edinburgh

7From the mid-eighteenth century onwards, plaster casting, a very old technique, was increasingly used to make anatomical models. The making of plaster casts and the use of plaster for artistic and architectural purposes go back to Egyptian antiquity. Ancient plaster casts, including life masks, were used in artists’ workshops, in private collections, as an aid for copying of models, and casting and moulding techniques in plaster were used extensively in antiquity as decoration for built interiors.7 The eighteenth century saw a great revival of plaster casting: plaster was used for interior decorations, but also to copy classical sculptures, which would be bought by newly established art academies, artists, and collectors.

8Yet it would be too easy to dismiss plaster casting as straightforward copying or a merely technical skill, as even in plaster casting, choices have to be made throughout the process regarding the pose of the model, the way the mould is built up, and applying finishes such as wax or paint. Plaster casts are now usually made with plaster gauze or alginate, an algae-based powder which forms a viscous gum when mixed with water, resulting in a flexible mould. However, in the early nineteenth century it was more common to use a paste of plaster and water without gauze.8

9The body part or parts that are to be cast have to be thoroughly covered in an oily substance such as vegetable oil to prevent the plaster from sticking to hair and skin. By laying threads of silk before casting, once the plaster has hardened, the mask can be taken off by lifting the threads. If the face of a living person was cast, quills or rolled paper would be inserted in the nostrils when a life mask was made to ensure the casted person could continue breathing. If a full head cast was to be made, the back of the head would be pressed into a flat dish containing plaster while the face was also covered.9 It can be uncomfortable for the subject of the casting, as gypsum plaster mixed with water forms a paste that will harden within minutes, in an exothermic reaction which can get very warm. The process for other body parts and organs was similar, but whatever body part was cast, a certain amount of skill and material literacy was required to make a successful cast.

10Whereas artists and collectors could obtain their plaster casts of classical sculpture from specialized dealers, anatomists had other requirements, as casts made under the supervision of William Hunter show. In such anatomical models, based on casts of flayed human bodies, muscles, veins, arteries and even lymph nodes would be pronounced, highlighted by both relief and colouring. Most famous is ‘Smugglerius’, a full-body polychrome écorché plaster cast made for Hunter from the body of a convicted smuggler by Agostino Carlini in 1776, posed as the dying Gaul. Yet by the early nineteenth century, we hardly see plaster casts of ideal anatomy like these anymore – the attention had shifted to new fields in medicine: pathology and physiognomy.

11Carin Berkowitz has convincingly argued that the plaster casts in the collections of the Scottish surgeon and anatomist Charles Bell (1774–1842) functioned much like actual specimens in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century anatomical collections: they were made of specific bodies or body parts that could not be preserved otherwise due to their size or the fact that the patient was still alive. Although some anatomical museums were open to the public, they were primarily intended for the use of medical students and professionals, and objects such as plaster casts were teaching tools that functioned in a larger pedagogical system of drawings, prints, textbooks, and lectures.10 What we do not know however, is how big their role was and who made them and how. This is an important issue as it can provide us with a more profound and holistic understanding of the organization of anatomical knowledge.

12Plaster casts played a role, albeit a limited one, in the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh Museum throughout the first half of the eighteenth century. In the spring and summer of 1825, when the College was making efforts to expand the museum collection and make it more useful for fellows and their students, a report from the Museum curators to the board read: ‘[T]he Curators of the museum beg to report to the college that 82 preparations including 4 Casts have been prepared during the last 6 months are now exhibited on this table, and are ready to be deposited in the museum.’11 Although a brief overview of costs was added to the report, this does not state specific costs for the making of the casts. In the incomplete manuscript catalogues of the collection, 41 casts and 9 models were listed between 1823 and 1842 out of a total of almost 2,300 objects, so a mere 1.8 per cent of objects were casts – the rest were preparations.12 In some cases, the donor of the cast is mentioned, but this of course does not necessarily mean that he was also the person who made it. Strikingly, fifteen different people donated a single cast between 1823 and 1838. Only Robert Thomson, a surgeon from Dundee, donated eight casts at once in 1840. This implies two things: first, that either not many surgeons and anatomists made plaster casts or had them made, and second, that these plaster casts were only used occasionally as a means of illustrating case histories, mainly when a preparation was not available.

13That there are relatively few plaster casts and models in anatomical collections, even during what was supposed to be the heyday of plaster casting, implies several things too. First, that the making of plaster casts was seen by medical men as a supplementary technique rather than a standard procedure in the documentation of a case. Second, it suggests that few medical men actually made the effort of learning how to make a plaster cast – it makes no sense to invest a considerable amount of time and effort in learning to master a technique you will only want to use very incidentally.

14That raises the question of how a medical man could learn to make a plaster cast if he wanted to. There were basically two options: from texts or by one-on-one instruction. In the first half of the nineteenth century, educated men in Edinburgh like surgeons in theory would have had access to a few textual sources on plaster casting. A popular book like Smith’s 1815 Panorama of Science and Art, for example, contained thirteen pages on the making of plaster casts.13 There was even a textbook aimed specifically at anatomists: Thomas Pole’s 1790 The Anatomical Instructor, reprinted in 1813, contained an illustrated 51-page section on the production, colouring, finishing, and repair of plaster moulds and casts.14 Pole explained in detail the different qualities of plaster of Paris that were available, how to mix plaster to the right consistency, and all the factors that have to be taken into account when making casts of soft and hard bodies, as well as from living bodies.

15Yet even if such a text was available, it would require a lot of practice to successfully make plaster casts of diseased body parts and organs, and instruction from an experienced caster would no doubt have been a more efficient way to learn. Although I have found no evidence of one-on-one instruction in plaster casting in Edinburgh, Frederick Knox, brother of Robert Knox, wrote in The Anatomist’s Instructor in 1836:

The art of modelling [in plaster] trenches upon that of the artist, and, as everyone knows, is practiced by a number of persons as an art. Professors of this branch of science are in every large city, and I recommend to do as I did, viz. visit the studio of the artificer in stucco. All in this line in Edinburgh, at least, I found most communicative, and happy at all times to explain everything, and much more of the art than the anatomist can possibly ever require. I candidly confess that twenty volumes would not have given me the insight of one hour’s sojourn in the garret room of my Italian friend.15

16One of the first printed catalogues of the Royal College of Surgeons’ museum show that around 1836, it possessed at least 50 plaster casts of diseased limbs, organs, bones, ulcers, and tumours. This may seem like a lot, but we have to keep in mind that this was part of a total collection of well over 3000 items, so a mere 1.7 per cent. The dates when and places where these casts were created, if recorded at all, vary wildly – including, for example, a cast of a distorted pelvis made in Manchester in 1779.16 Again, the creator of the casts is not mentioned anywhere, although many stem from the collections of Charles Bell. As Berkowitz has shown, Bell was a talented and well-connected artist himself, so rather than focusing on plaster casts from his collections, I want to focus here on a set of plaster objects from the Royal College of Surgeons Edinburgh collections that are less easily understood.

17The collections contain two busts of Robert Penman, and the anatomical museum at the University of Edinburgh has a third, unpainted bust17 (fig. 1a-c). Sixteen-year-old Robert Penman first consulted a local surgeon around 1820 with a growth on his jaw the size of an egg. The surgeon extracted some molars, but after that the tumour only grew faster. It was first removed at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary when it was about ‘two fists’ in size. Penman remained in hospital for eight months before returning home, but the tumour started growing again. Two years later he returned to Edinburgh, but this time the surgeons refused to remove it. After another three and a half years, the tumour now ‘at least three times larger than when he last quitted it’, Penman once more returned to Edinburgh, where Syme and two other surgeons successfully removed it. The case history with the cast in the College catalogue noted that ‘his mouth is contracted to nearly its natural size, and his appearance is not disagreeable.’18

Fig. 1a. Photograph of a white plaster anatomical model of Penman’s face

Fig. 1b. Photograph of a bronze-coloured anatomical model of Penman’s face

Fig. 1c. Photograph of a painted anatomical model of Penman’s face

18Penman’s case was extensively documented in writing, images, and casts, and described in various professional and popular media. Yet the ‘bust’ appears not to be a cast of his entire face, but rather a cast of his tumour with a face modelled around it. When a description of a ‘cast’ of Penman’s face was first entered in the manuscript museum catalogue, there was only one, so one of the objects in the museum collections must have been added at a later date – although it is very well possible that both these objects and the one at the University of Edinburgh were produced at the same time. A preparation of the removed tumour was also donated to the museum but has since disappeared. The original owners of these objects had distinct ideas about how they should look: the monochrome cast has been coloured to resemble bronze, and the polychrome cast/model has uncanny details, such as the eyes that have been painted as to make them look open. Another remarkable difference is the fact that two of them have open nostrils, while one does not.

19As previously discussed, making plaster casts from a plaster mould is a process that requires a fair amount of practice and skill, as it is difficult to remove the cast from the mould. The mould of Penman’s face must have survived for quite some time, as there is at least one more similar object in the collection, and there might have been another one in the Ballingall collection of military surgery at the University of Edinburgh. Although the casts are not signed, the pedestal is typical for busts created in the workshop of the O’Neil family in Edinburgh during the same period. Luke O’Neil, Jr. (c.1789–1839) was a sculptor, modeler and artist to the Edinburgh Phrenological Society, the third generation in the family business.19 Phrenological heads created by him for the society have the same double-rimmed pedestal as Penman’s.20 The variety in finishings suggests that the model was sold plain, and buyers chose and maybe even applied a finishing to their liking themselves, similar to the practice of having prints in books coloured by hand after purchase. The fact that three copies have survived implies that it was quite a popular object among medical men.

20Yet the fact that these casts are not signed, and that they form a relatively small part of anatomical collections, gives an indication of their status as epistemic and aesthetic objects. The absence of a signature forms a stark contrast with the many medical illustrations of the period, and suggests drawing, etching, and painting skills were more highly valued by medical men than the skills required to make a successful plaster cast. Of course, the relatively easy accessibility of drawing techniques goes a long way in explaining the preference for drawing over the making of plaster casts: the materials for a sketch are infinitely less bulky than those for a plaster cast, and the making of a sketch is much less invasive than making a plaster cast.

21Apart from Knox’s remark about his ‘Italian friend’, I have found no evidence of sustained professional relationships between Edinburgh medical men and stucco artists in the first half of the nineteenth century. Yet this single remark and the fact that O’Neil produced a plethora of phrenological heads and this model of Penman’s face, demonstrate that Edinburgh medical men did know where to find specialist plaster casters. Stucco artists had travelled to Ireland, England and Scotland in great numbers in the eighteenth century because of the popularity of stucco as an interior decoration, and several ‘stucco makers’, some with Italian last names, were still listed each year in Edinburgh trade directories throughout the 1820s and 1830s.21 Moreover, we have to bear in mind the fact that many less successful visual artists in this period ran side businesses, for example as chemists or sellers of artists’ supplies. Hence it is not unlikely that medical men sought out such people if they needed help in making a plaster cast.

22It remains to be seen how much use Edinburgh surgeons and anatomists made of the presence of stucco makers as craftsmen or instructors. In the early 1830s, when Frederick Knox compiled a catalogue of his brother Robert’s personal anatomical museum, of the nearly 700 objects listed only two are plaster casts – one of the skull of a dugong (a kind of sea mammal) and one of a fractured knee joint. The rest of the museum consisted of anatomical preparations.22 In the case of the dugong skull it appears that Frederick Knox prepared the actual skull and donated it to the Royal Society of Edinburgh, but it is not clear whether he made the cast himself too. In the case of the knee joint, no details are given about why a plaster cast was made rather than a preparation, and although Knox states that he performed the dissection himself, he provides no information about who made the cast. It appears that plaster casts were used very sporadically when there was no other way of preserving a specimen, rather than as a matter of routine. In a newer catalogue by Knox, probably compiled in the late 1830s, almost 1,200 bone preparations are listed, but not one single plaster cast.

23Later in life, Robert Knox expressed a profound preference for casts over anatomical preparations and waxworks – or so it seemed. In a lecture in 1846 to the Pathological Society of Birmingham, Knox stated that attempts to preserve the original colour and appearance of real anatomical specimens were doomed to failure, and that anatomical waxworks were expensive and too fragile.23 Yet this preference appears to have been informed by personal grudges and interests rather than by conviction. In the early 1840s, Knox had been turned down as lecturer in anatomy by the Scottish Academy of Arts, and at the time he made his comments about the superiority of plaster casts over preparations and waxes in 1845, he was managing a popular exhibition of over 1,200 models by the French anatomist Philibert-Félix Thibert in London.

24At the annual meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science in 1846, the same year as his Birmingham lecture, Knox showed coloured models of fishes from Thibert’s collections, but when questioned about the method of manufacture Knox replied ‘that he was not at liberty to state more than that it was a plaster cast painted’.24 This was not true – Thibert made his casts from carton-pâté or carton-pierre, better known now as papier-maché.25 Finally, in 1852, Knox published A Manual of Artistic Anatomy, which was basically a descriptive anatomy for artists combined with some transcendental aesthetic theory, but gave no practical information whatsoever about artistic technique.26 In all likelihood, this too was an economically inspired publication rather than anything else. This shows the complexity of the relationships between medical men and visual artists around 1850. Their interactions were shaped not only by rational considerations such as the transmission of artistic techniques and anatomical knowledge, or the joint search for techniques to preserve and represent the human body for anatomical study, but also by the more basely pragmatic imperatives to which professional and entrepreneurial men were usually subject.

Wood: Philadelphia

25The Edinburgh case raises the question to what extent the interactions between medical men and visual artists around 1800 were shaped by specific local networks, interests, supply and demand. A comparative study of anatomical modelling practices in Philadelphia provides an answer. There, a college of physicians was established in 1787, but an anatomical museum was founded only in 1818, with the collection of the late professor of chemistry and the institutes of medicine at the College of Philadelphia, Caspar Wistar (1761–1818). Wistar came from a family of craftspeople: his grandfather and namesake (1696–1752) was a German-born glassmaker. The younger Caspar studied medicine in Edinburgh and was a skilled maker of anatomical preparations, which he created by injecting organs with wax. The catalogue of his collections in 1832 listed 127 anatomical preparations of human tissue and 25 of animal tissue.27 There also was a collection of lymphatic preparations which Wistar had bought from the famous Italian anatomist Mascagni in 1812, and the collection contained at least seventeen models made from various materials, such as wax, paper, clay, wood, and plaster. No maker is specified for the models in paper, wax, and plaster, and possibly Wistar made some of these himself. However, the ten wooden models and one clay model in his collection were described as ‘by William Rush’.

26Philadelphia-born William Rush (1756–1833) had started his career as a carver of ship figureheads, learning the trade from his father and the famous stonecutter and carver, Edward Cutbush, Sr. (1745–1790). Rush was one of the founders of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), which was established in 1805, and from the early nineteenth century onwards, he created a number of sculptures for public places in Philadelphia. The models made by Rush were one of a kind – and the only anatomical models he ever made. Wistar had ordered them between 1802 and 1818, a period in which the number of students attending his classes was increasing strongly. He decided he needed something more dramatic than his usual anatomical preparations as a teaching aid: enlarged models of human anatomy, which would be visible even from the back rows. Probably realizing that this was beyond his own modelling skills, he turned to Rush, who made at least twenty models for him.

27It is very likely that Wistar and Rush knew each other before they started their collaboration. They moved in the same circles of learned men in Philadelphia, a relatively small city at the time. Moreover, by the time Wistar asked Rush to make the models, he was already a well-known artist in Philadelphia. When Wistar died in 1818 and the last model Rush had been working on – of the wrist – remained unfinished, Wistar’s colleague Philip Syng Physick (1768–1837) paid for it to be finished and had it added to the newly established anatomical museum.28 This clearly shows that Rush’s model-making for Wistar was not simply an informal exchange between friends – it was, if not strictly, then at least partly business.

28It was innovative business too: these larger-than-life anatomical models are the first of their kind. They could be taken apart and reassembled using strategically placed hooks, screws, and bolts. And although the primary material used for them was wood, Rush finished them using other materials such as gesso, paint, leather, papier-maché, and string. The models were used in teaching until at least the 1930s, and conservation reports from the 1980s revealed repeated repairs and repaints.29 So although in this case there is no concrete evidence that Wistar taught Rush anatomy or that Rush taught Wistar practical skills for model making, it is clear that they were very much aware of each other’s knowledge and skills, and that makes it rather unlikely that they did not learn from each other. Moreover, it seems unlikely that they used Pole’s book, as the techniques they employed are not described in it.

29To return to some of the questions I started with: yes, in Philadelphia too artists and physicians collaborated around 1800, albeit in a very different manner than in Edinburgh. There is no proof that medical men and artists systematically taught each other techniques for preservation and depiction of the human body, or that they used a book like Pole’s. There were no structured drawing classes for anatomists at the College of Philadelphia, the medical department of the University of Pennsylvania, or the College of Physicians, or anatomy classes for artists at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.30 Although the latter institution did have an anatomy professor in the person of Dr Nathaniel Chapman between 1812 and 1822, he appears to have only given a lecture once, the text of which is lost. Just as the College of Physicians was primarily a professional and not an educational body in its early years, the PAFA until the mid-nineteenth century was mainly a place for art exhibitions and the copying of casts and paintings by young artists – there were no formal classes or regular instruction in artisanal techniques during the first decades of the Academy.31

30However, there clearly were close personal connections between medical men and artists and craftsmen, and this brings me back to the question as to whether there were distinct differences from or similarities to practices in contemporary Europe. There is an interesting similarity between Wistar’s collection and contemporary anatomical collections in Scotland in terms of the division between preparations and other objects, such as models, although the kind of models and the material they are made of is very different. The ratio of preparations consisting primarily of human and animal tissue to models consisting primarily of other materials, was very similar in Charles Bell’s Edinburgh collection and Caspar Wistar’s Philadelphia collection.

31Yet the variety of materials used in Wistar’s models (wax, wood, plaster, clay, paper) is much greater than that of the Scottish models, where plaster casts were the material of choice, to be used in combination with drawings. Another striking difference is the identity of the artists who created these models: whereas in Edinburgh, apart from in Bell’s personal collection, no makers of models were identified by name – only an ‘Italian friend’ is mentioned as an instructor in the making of plaster casts once – in Philadelphia we see that the roles of the anatomist and artist-craftsman in the making of models are relatively well documented.

Conclusion

32To conclude, this analysis of plaster and wooden models in Edinburgh and Philadelphia collections shows that the choices anatomists made in the creation of anatomical models around 1800 did not depend on instructive texts, or on the local availability of modelling materials, or the ease with which an anatomist could learn a modelling technique himself. The two most important factors appear to have been the ways in which the models were used for documentation, research, and teaching on the one hand, and the local presence of skilled craftspeople and their social status on the other. Plaster models of interesting pathological cases could be made and reproduced relatively easily by skilled stucco artists, and coloured to the taste and needs of the owner, while Wistar’s desire for large, sturdy models was inspired by the need for visibility and demonstration in his large classroom. The presence of ‘Italian friends’ specialized in stucco in Edinburgh and that of a proficient wood sculptor in Philadelphia further inspired each anatomist’s choice of materials for their respective models.

33These close collaborations should also be understood in the professional and social context of the period. As has been pointed out in the introduction too, how knowledge was ordered was influenced as much by codes of social interaction as by epistemic choices. Medicine around 1800 was much less specialized than it is today. Although sub-disciplines such as anatomy, pathology, and surgery were in the process of developing more distinct disciplinary identities, medical practitioners were holistic generalists, especially compared to today’s hyper-specializations, which focus on specific organs or diseases. Although some anatomical models were available for purchase, these tended to be very expensive and were often only made upon request, such as Wistar’s models. The Edinburgh plaster casts can in a sense be considered to be the first serially produced anatomical models, decades before studios like that of Jérôme Auzoux (1797–1880) in France and Adolf Ziegler (1820–1889) in Germany started to produce large numbers of standardized anatomical models from papier mâché and wax respectively.

34The distinctions between art, craft, and science were in transition too. Medicine, especially applied medicine such as surgery, had long been considered an arte in the Aristotelian sense of the word, aimed at productive acquisition and application of knowledge, rather than a purely theoretical science aimed at seeking truth for its own sake. The anonymity of the artists and craftspeople involved in the production of anatomical models in Edinburgh can be considered an act of boundary work or ‘othering’ by their medical collaborators, who were trying hard to elevate the social and academic standing of their profession. Meanwhile, in the relatively new city of Philadelphia, far away from the old continent, these constraints appear to have been felt less.

35Finally, we see little in the way of textual records reflecting these collaborations. Pole’s The Anatomical Instructor was, in his own words, meant as ‘a companion and assistant’ to anatomists in training ‘at the usual places of instruction’; it was not aimed at ‘professed anatomists’, and thus far I have found no concrete evidence of it being used by anatomists wanting to make models.32 Quite possibly, as Knox put it in The Anatomist’s Instructor, an hour spent with a professional artist would be more instructive than twenty books on the subject. Based on this analysis, it is safe to conclude that anatomical model making in Edinburgh and Philadelphia around 1800 relied primarily on one-on-one instruction and on close collaboration, rather than on instructive texts and images. Together, these findings demonstrate that studying the intersections of material culture and collaborations, divisions and valuations of knowledge, labour and expertise can tell us at least as much about the ordering of knowledge and the formation of disciplines as more traditional approaches like concept history can.