When Greek sculptors portrayed the health, musculature and proportionality of the body, the ‘Father of Western Medicine’, Hippocrates was investigating these very issues in relation to ‘the four humors’. When Roman sculptors produced lifelike busts and equestrian statues showing blood vessels, Galen was dissecting animals in Ancient Rome to understand blood circulation. Not long after Leonardo and Michelangelo secretly dissected the body, Andreas Vesalius did so publicly, overthrowing Galenic anatomy and generating new portrayals of the body. His anatomy lessons for artists, physicians, scientists and the public provided a new pedagogical model that continued until the twentieth century in which art, science and medicine intersected in their scrutiny of the spectacular body.

Starting with Hippocrates, Galen and the rupture spawned by Vesalius's public anatomy lesson of the spectacular body, this course will trace its impact upon art, science and medicine from the Reformation until Dr. Günter Von Hagen's contemporary performances of public autopsies and his controversial exhibitions, Body Worlds. It will investigate the pseudosciences of craniometry, physiognomy and phrenology, August Morel’s theory of degeneration, Charles Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’, Francis Galton’s theory of eugenics and Fascist theories of Race Hygiene in order to comprehend the docile body, degenerate body, hysterical body, Semitic body, racial body, eugenic body and Nazi Body. It will conclude by examining the Human Genome Project, Stem Cell Research, xenotransplantation and transspeciation in order to explore the contemporary genetic body and the possibilities of a post-human body.