#self-dissection

[thomasbernhard]

When I take Wolfsegg and my family apart, when I dissect, annihilate, and extinguish them, I am actually taking myself apart, dissecting, annihilating, and extinguishing myself. I have to admit that the idea of self-dissection and self-extinction appeals to me, I told Gambetti. I’ll spend my life dissecting and extinguishing myself, Gambetti, and if I’m not mistaken I’ll succeed in this self-dissection and self-extinction. I actually do nothing but dissect and extinguish myself. When I wake up in the morning the first thing I think of it setting about my work of dissection and extinction with a will.

–Thomas Bernhard, Extinction (English translation by David McLintock)

[biomedicalephemera]

I just came across these wonderful 'self-dissection' paintings through a post on facebook. Google "anatomical self dissections" by "Danny Quirk." :-)

I didn't recognize the name, but I recognize the paintings for sure! I love surrealist art and Danny Quirk's self-dissection paintings are surreal in an incredibly life-like fashion.

Self-display in anatomical engravings was common during the Renaissance and early Romantic eras. Even the anatomist most associated with the "Age of Enlightenment" and rationalism utilized self-display in some of his superficial muscle engravings.

It wasn't until the early 19th century that true realism began to take hold in anatomical diagrams and engravings, in a movement for more accuracy in medicine, whose first major spearhead was the Scottish anatomist John Bell.