Scholars from diverse disciplines will be interested in the material that Elizabeth Stephens traverses: wax Venuses, popular and educative anatomy museums, sideshow exhibitions of freakish bodies. Stephens engages with the literature on spectacular anatomy from a cultural studies perspective and offers an excellent entry point to a large and burgeoning multidisciplinary literature on a subject that ... Read morecontinues to intrigue both scholars and popular audiences.
American Historical Review
Anatomy as Spectacle makes an important contribution to the history of science by underscoring the crucial place of cultural history within the discipline. Stephens's use of visual and material sources demonstrates the ways in which a close reading of these types of texts challenges received narratives about the professionalization of science.
ISIS, volume 103, number 2
Stephens' Anatomy as Spectacle offers a fresh and engaging account of the budding, and indeed the wilting, of a historical nexus between exhibitory cultures and practices, medicine as a discipline that disciplines, and of course the maintenance, meaning and value of particular bodies in the everyday. It is well worth a read for scholars interested or doing research in fields such as disability studies, sensory studies, gender studies and indeed that spacious, noisy interval at which these are often drawn together: cultural studies.
Somatechnics, Volume 2, Issue 2
Anatomy as Spectacle makes an important contribution to the history of science by underscoring the crucial place of cultural history within the discipline.
ISIS, Volume 103, Number 2
A pleasure to read, this well-written book offers many thoughtful and provocative reflections on anatomy and exhibition and will appeal to a wide range of scholars concerned with disability, culture and medical history. Maria Frawley Show Less