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Hello, and welcome to Humanities Matter, brought to you by braille. I'm Lee Jung-Grechko, and this week we'll be looking at key issues in the field of humanities. Today we're talking with Dr. Kelly Buckley.
She's a graduate of Penn State University and works for the CAA, formerly the College Art Association. Her paper is Pathos, Arrows, and Curiosity, the History and Reception of Ivory Anatomical Models from the 17th century to today. Dr. Buckley, thank you so much for sitting down with us.
Thank you. So just wanted to give a little introduction to these, what you described in your paper as mannequins, because I also had to really dig into the photos that you have accompanying this journal as well, because it's hard to wrap your mind around just what these mannequins look like. So before we describe the possible uses of them, can you tell us what these mannequins are, what they look like, and basically how they were developed? So on the outset what they look like are miniature dolls on beds, and they're these tiny white women, for the most part, on these velvet beers, so to speak.
But what's interesting about them is you can move their arms and they actually open up, and they have all of these anatomical parts inside. But theses aren't even as big as a Barbie. So if you grew up around a time of Sheera, they're closer to the size of Sheera. So they're really tiny anatomical models with really, really tiny parts that can actually be taken out.
So if you can imagine a Sheera doll that you can take apart, and it would have lungs at a heart and a fetus inside, but this was all carved in the late 1600s and 1700s. So it's this very precious, fragile, seaming object that is both movable and able to be taken apart, but is also therefore, displayed in a way. Yeah, and of course, as you mentioned, they're very precious because they are carved out of ivory as well. And really we know very little about the cause or the use of these mannequins, except for a quote from this 18th century professor, Giuseppe Isnardi of Fosano.
Can you tell us how he shed light on the mannequins use? Well, the thing with Giuseppe Isnardi is that he's the only person that wrote something very specifically about an anatomical model like this. And we know that he created his own, likely after one of these ivory versions. And he did his in wax, but he put forth this prose or this poetry that kind of explained that it was really to show his students what the body was like and to impart in them a sense of empathy for the body.
So he's not just showing the body, but he's explaining things as he sort of gaze upon it. But it's also this poem from the voice of this object. So it's kind of giving a voice to an object in a way that art historians don't normally see. But it's also one of the only texts that we have.
So it's something that's been cited a lot of times to sort of give the mannequins a voice, but it's also a really important part in really understanding these mannequins as objects of academic study because past translations just said, oh, they're for the use of midwives. And unfortunately, this text is far beyond when these mannequins were first invented. So they were created in the late 1600s, and this was written in the mid-1800s. But what's really important is that he says that there are specifically for acrosurance if you go back to the original French.
So it's more specifically saying that these were for the use of future man-midwives. And that's important because when you look at who owns these and where a lot of these ended up as well as who made them, they really seem to have been a much more integral part of manne midwives and their presence and their teaching than people formerly thought. So this is really something that it not only gives the mannequins a voice, but it helps identify some of the ways in which they work throughout history. Because as you can see, you know, if you look at the article, you see the problem with these objects is that there's not a single explanation for their use over time.
You know, there may be original intent and there may be user's intent, but these all change throughout time sort of organically. So this is the only text that we have that shows one person's very specific interpretation of them. So I want to touch on something else that you mentioned that, you know, part of the reason or I guess one of the hypotheses for why the mannequins were created was to try and give doctors a sort of sense of empathy about women's bodies. You mentioned that surgeons at the time were getting into sort of a very mechanical way of treating women's bodies with a lot of different tools as opposed to female midwives who obviously knew a little bit more intimately about women's bodies because they were women themselves.
So can you talk about that role that the mannequins played and then also just wondering if you can talk about what man midwives were and what they knew about women's bodies, specifically pregnant women in the late 1600s? So I'm going to probably tie this a little bit by saying that a lot of the information about midwives is to sort of contextualize the mannequins over time. But being created in the late 1600s, their intent might be slightly, it's not entirely clear what their original intent was. But what we do see is that starting with men midwives, so all over Europe, you see more and more male surgeons becoming a part of regulating men or midwifery.
So especially in Germany, originally you had midwives in every village and they would sort of learn by an apprenticeship type system and increasingly you see regulation over them. So it starts in some towns with the wives of city counselors and things like that. And then eventually they get male surgeons to examine the women and test them. And these men start writing treatises where they're seemingly correcting the ways of midwives and going against a lot of things that were becoming problematized including herbal remedies and things like that that also became associated with things like witchcraft.
So they're going in a more academic direction which of course men could go and women could not. And in writing these treatises, they started sort of inching into the creation of the field of manned midwifery which in one way was surgery. So it was usually male surgeons coming into it. And then these ended up being across Europe.
Usually men that would come when midwives couldn't birth a baby without assistance. So if they really had a bind, the manned midwife would come. And they usually had tools. So the thing that a surgeon had at midwife didn't were things like forceps.
And this was, it's kind of an interesting parallel to the mannequins because the forceps were very specific tools. And each manned midwife tried to create their own set of forceps. So there are dozens of these named after the last names of manned midwives. And there's so much competition and that's why you see these.
But the mannedkins were kind of on the other side of this. So therefore teaching and displaying but not really explaining or being used in a medical sense. So it's kind of hard when you're not able to see one of these. But coming from a modern perspective, they don't look very detailed in terms of what we would expect from anatomy.
So even when you look at them, they're not explanatory on their own. But they were used as a sort of a prop. So the forceps were a prop that showed mechanical prowess and invention and knowledge of the female body. Whereas the mannequins showed because they were luxury items, a sort of sense of wealth of dexterity.
But also this conceptual idea of this manned midwife looming large over the life of a tiny woman that was kind of very literally in his hands. So they kind of worked at two ends of the spectrum of manned midwives trying to present themselves. But I'm explaining the forceps because it kind of shows that sense of competition that came with this role. And they were also working against a lot of different criticisms.
So in the late 1600s, there weren't as many of those criticisms as you see later in time in terms of men being overly mechanical. It's not until you see really famous female midwives like Jane Shark where they explicitly say, in a way that a lot of people read it, that they were too mechanical and that they were hurting women by trying to use all these metal instruments and not understanding a sort of tactile prowess that a midwife needs. But that's another thing with these mannequins. You can show you're not just using these giant forceps and extracting babies like some kind of monster.
You can really show your dexterity by playing with these really tiny, somewhat fragile models, which if you look at the actual model, often has the woman where once you lift her hand up from her stomach to open her up, she has her elbow on her wrist on her forehead as though she's in pain, she's painting, she needs your help. So it's really looking like the manned midwife is sort of saving this tiny being within the scope of his practice. Yeah, it's really interesting actually as you point out to think about how the mannequins and the forceps are sort of these two things that are working in parallel. You have the forceps which are obviously very mechanical, they're named after the doctor that creates them.
And then you have these tiny little ivory, essentially dolls, which as you mentioned, it's difficult for them to be perfectly anatomically correct because they're carving them out of a tusk essentially. But they're made with such dexterity and as I understand, I think a lot of them weren't signed as well. I think you mentioned that. Yeah, none of them were signed.
I've never seen a single signed copy, but a lot of ivory's of this type weren't signed, so it wasn't entirely strange. Like these weren't necessarily, they were art pieces, but it came from a family that did very much mechanical pieces. And they signed some other things that they were made for say a court, but in this workshop, they just didn't sign any of their works at that point in time. Can you talk about that family a little bit?
This man, Stefan Zick, he came from a family of ivory turners. Can you talk about how his previous work differed from the mannequins and the details that he put into these pieces? Sure. Well, actually Stefan Zick came from a family of ivory turners, both his father and grandfather worked in different courts.
And they're best known for making these things called pocals, which just look like large ivory trophies. But what's interesting is they often have either moving parts inside, which can move with the help of a string, including tiny ivory portraits on a little sort of coin shape that will twist back and forth into two different images, or they'll be turned into almost like double and triple helices and in different directions to show their mastery of turning. And turning was thought of as the perfect thing for a prince to learn because you learned geometry, patience, an understanding of adaptation. So turning was a very big thing in the courts, but when Stefan Zick came along, his family had already started a workshop in Nuremberg.
So the workshop was not the same kind of payment system. You know, you would just get paid to make things to the court, but you really had to kind of create an audience. And they had a reputation for creating these triple helix bracelets, or they weren't actually worn as bracelets, but these triple helix turned ivories that were just fantastical and nobody could understand how they did them. As well as these other like pocals with balls inside of balls.
So you would actually turn pieces of ivory inside of other pieces of ivory that had holes in it. So very complicated things. As well as other things that had anywhere from, you know, six to a dozen or more pieces that could be put together. So little puzzle ivories.
So Stefan came from that background and he grew up learning those things and mastered them. But then he became interested somehow in anatomy. And one of the first things he sort of created on his own were these eye models, which are very, they're really made for something like turning because he can turn the little stand and then the top, you would just have these half spheres that show all of the different parts of the eye. And those were quite successful, even to the point where he tried to make them more and more in a tonically accurate, as did others in his workshop over time.
So they obviously sold quite a bit and they were very, very much known in the market. And after that he created these ear models, which also, if you know anything about the ear bones, there are some very minute pieces. And both of these, the eye models were actually larger than normal eye usually. And the ear models were about the same size as an ear.
But it would have these tiny bones that were also attached by a string so that you wouldn't lose them. And these were actually quite successful. They were mentioned in a number of places, not only in the 1600s but later, well under the 1800s, you know, they were still wandering around the market. So these, these worked really well.
And it seems that the full body mannequins were sort of a challenge that Stefan sort of overcame, you know, he wanted to have a full body. But the problem with ivory is that it's only so thick. And what's interesting about these is they actually use very little ivory. So you, you don't need a full piece, you can actually use these sort of planks.
So these are actually very flat and he uses the bed. And carves into the bed to make it look more three dimensional. So even though he's using very little ivory to make this full body, he's trying to make it look as three dimensional as possible and show all of the main sort of parts of it. So what ultimately is the legacy that of these mannequins?
Do they end up having any long-term influence on medicine or are we just rediscovering them now as essentially art pieces? Well, I think it's telling that, you know, I'm an art historian and I'm the person most interested in them. And I think part of the issue is that medical history really came up as a lot of male doctors in the 20th century, you know, getting a better understanding of the history of medicine, but with a focus on accuracy. And there are many other social historians that would say it's just as interesting to see how doctors use objects to show their own value or to use as props or to use to sort of bolster themselves.
So I'm really interested in objects that are in this liminal space that aren't necessarily there to be the most accurate, but that are there to create a response in their audience to create this interest and that aren't necessarily pinned down to just being, you know, say the most accurate anatomical model of this century. This was just like a very interesting phenomenon and a very interesting point in time. And I think that looking into that, we can get a much better idea of sort of the evolution of different objects and how they compared to one another and how they worked for one another over time. So I'm really interested in this being very much an in-between object, but also a unique type of object.
I don't mention this in the article, but I created a catalog of them. And I talked to a number of people that want to make a database, including Duke who has a collection. But no, I've catalogs, you know, how many there were, what parts they have, if they're bone or ivory, all of their different details created more than 13 different categories for them stylistically. And I actually had a Fulbright scholarship.
So I lived in Germany and I worked around Germany fighting them and Czech Republic, Switzerland, the Netherlands, all over the place. So, and I used to still take them apart, especially because the parts are so different. Like in one group, all of a sudden, you find ovaries and you're like, oh, that wasn't there before. And yeah, some of them, you know, there were place parts, which was really disconcerting.
I found a tiny wooden doll that was actually from like a dollhouse set in one of them. So the other funny, but yeah, once you see them in person, you start to understand better both how they're made and how they feel. And how, yeah, sort of how day do they are. Right, right.
Really fascinating digging into this. Thank you again so much for writing it. Yeah, thank you. Dr.
Kelly Buckley, she's the author of Pathos, Arrows, and Curiosity, the history and reception of ivory anatomical models from the 17th century to today. You are listening to the Humanities Matter podcast. You can find more podcast episodes on Apple podcast, Spotify, and Google podcast.