The Courtiers' Anatomists

Book excerpt: "The Courtiers Anatomists" is about dead bodies and live animals in Louis XIV s Paris. By exploring the practice of seventeenth-century anatomy, Anita Guerrini reveals how animals were central to collecting, describing, and classifyingnatural historyand how anatomy and natural history were linked through animal dissection and vivisection. She looks at the early modern animal project, and particularly at Joseph-Guichard Duverney and Claude Perrault, in the context of the court, the city of Paris, and burgeoning audiences for natural history. The Academy and the King s Garden were the two main sites in Paris for the performance of natural history, and much of the Scientific Revolution in France played itself out in these two public institutions. Fascinating stories are culled in "The Courtiers Anatomists" to explore the relationships between empiricism and theory, human and animal, the origins of the natural history museum and modern science, and the relationship between science and other cultural activities including art, music, and literature. This book will be warmly welcomed by historians of science, medicine, and France, as well as by early modernists and many others in the growing field of animal studies."