The Courtiers’ Anatomists: Animals and Humans in Louis XIV’s Paris is a book that describes the early modern development of the science of anatomy in France. I found the book to be so interesting that I could not stop myself from going a few hundred words over the limit for this assignment. Instead of just summarizing the book, I am going to keep this review focused by addressing two goals that the author, Anita Guerrini, gives herself in her introduction. On page 14, she writes that 1) she wants to explore the role that the dissection of animals and humans had for the study of anatomy, and 2) she wants to add complexity to the historical discussion of ideas, events, and practices of that time. After an introduction to her and brief reviews of all six chapters of her book, I will ask if she achieved her goals. To end this essay, I will critique comments she makes in her introduction about the role of animals in historical narratives. Typically, historians concern themselves with human agency and the environment in which humans live, but Anita Guerrini is the first historian I have read who discusses the agency of animals – more specifically, non-human animals – so I do not want to miss the opportunity here to consider her perspective.
According to professor Guerrini’s homepage, https://anitaguerrini.com/, she is a retired professor of the history of science and medicine at Oregon State University. Before that, she taught history and environmental studies at the University of California and was a visiting professor in 2013 at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales in Paris. She was educated at Connecticut College, Oxford University, and received her PhD from Indiana University. Her accolades for The Courtiers’ Anatomists include the Pfizer Prize for best scholarly book in the history of science and a nomination for the American Library in Paris Book Prize. Professor Guerrini also held fellowships to the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, the Descartes Centre at the University of Utrecht, and the Camargo Foundation in Cassis, France.
Professor Guerrini’s homepage, is a good resource for readers who are curious about how her scholarly and personal interests relate to The Courtiers’ Anatomists. She gives a sense of her interest in French culture when she writes in her About section, “I’m happiest sitting in a café or somewhere outdoors filling the pages of a Clairefontaine notebook (I buy them in bulk whenever I’m in France; they’re small, cheap, and colorful).” I imagine her favorite cafés are in Paris. She lists her research interests as ranging from the 16th to the 20th centuries and including anatomy, the history of animals, natural history, the environment, and the history of food.
Broadly speaking, the six chapters of The Courtiers’ Anatomists move chronologically through the development of anatomical science in early modern Paris. In chapter one, professor Guerrini discusses the early modern era’s interest “medical humanism,” which refers to a reevaluation of medical and biological texts from ancient writers, such as Aristotle, Galen, and Hippocrates. She also describes the practical details of science at that time, including how salons, academies, and networks of correspondence influenced early proponents of dissection.
Because The Courtiers’ Anatomists focuses on Paris, it is worthwhile taking a moment to consider how the author justifies her geographical interest. On page 14, she presents her case: “Why Paris? In the seventeenth century, Paris was the most populous city in Europe and Louis XIV the most powerful monarch. As a center of cultural production, Paris contributed to the birth of many of the cultural markers of modernity . . . as well as science. Yet, compared to London, seventeenth century Paris has been much less explored as a site of science . . ..” What the author is doing, then, by contrasting science in Paris with science in London, is highlighting the importance of geography to the history of science. As easy as it is to focus only on theories and ideas, it is important in the history of science to understand the context in which theories and ideas develop. The quote above is a reminder for readers of the importance of geographical context.
Chapter two gives readers an introduction to the major scientific questions that preoccupied the Parisian early scientific community. The author mentions attempts to reconcile newly discovered plants and animals from the Americas into the existing world view of Europeans. As well, she mentions specific scientific challenges of the day, such as understanding and explaining the circulation of blood and the possibility of vacuums in nature. She also describes how the Parisian scientific community incorporated new tools, such as telescopes, maps, globes, skeletons, and dissection, into their research.
Before moving to chapter three, it is worth pausing again to consider how professor Guerrini complicates the theoretical background of science in chapter two. In particular, she discusses ideas different people had about how experimentation should work. On page 67, she writes that in early modern France, the idea of experimentation was in flux. People understood it in different ways. She mentions how Francis Bacon, for instance, advocated using an inductive method for “forcing nature to reveal her secrets,” while Robert Boyle emphasized how experimentation can predict results. This is a good example, then, of how Guerrini meets her second goal, which is to add complexity to the historical discussion.
Chapters three and four are less focused on theory than earlier sections of The Courtiers’ Anatomists. Chapter three covers institutions, discoveries, and changes in publication standards and describes how anatomists found bodies with which they could study and practice dissections. Chapter four discusses new kinds of exotic animals to which anatomists gained access, new methods people developed for dissections, and different perspectives regarding how to categorize animals.
The last two chapters focus on the later careers of two important anatomists and bring the narrative of the book to an end. Chapter five discusses the careers of Charles Perrault and Joseph-Guichard Duverney. It summarizes important theoretical disagreements they had, including over the nature of matter, sensation, and the possible causes behind the life and motion in animals. Chapter six brings new anatomists into the story and discusses how their interests changed their community. The story comes to an end with the death of Charles Perrault and Joseph-Guichard Duverney moving on to other projects outside of anatomy.
Before concluding this essay, it is worth one last pause to mention Professor Guerrini’s comments in chapter six about spectacle in anatomical science. She mentions it in sections two and three, where she describes how, under order of a royal decree, anatomists began to offer free lectures to the public. In those lectures, they discussed anatomy, mixed in stories about rich and famous individuals who had been autopsied, and, most surprisingly to me, used corpses. Joseph-Guichard Duverney was the most talented of these anatomist-lecturers. His audiences came to include, as Guerrini puts it on page 227, “medical and surgical students, natural philosophers, fashionable members of the court, and whoever else wished to drop by.” Perhaps surprisingly, this led to chaos: there was “foot stamping and rock throwing,” riots, complaints about riots, rules against wearing batons and swords, and the corruption of local guards.
Professor Guerrini’s fascinating peek into the spectacle that anatomical science and dissections inspired will probably be a surprise for her readers who assume that science only happens at the level of theory and only in labs and universities away from the general public. As sensational as the public dissections and lectures in Paris were, they played a role in disseminating knowledge. Guerrini points out on page 239 that the public lectures, “were staged performances intended not to discover new things about the body but to demonstrate what was known.” The public had the opportunity, therefore, to learn about anatomical science. Likewise, Guerrini’s comments remind her readers that spectacle and the patronage that made public lectures and demonstrations possible played a role in the development of science. This is another example of how science is more than theory and of how the author, once again, meets her second goal by adding complexity to the historical discussion.
To conclude this review, there is the question of Professor Guerrini’s goals and the issue of non-human animals in history. Each chapter addresses the first goal, which is to explore the role that dissection had for the study of anatomy. Chapters one, five, and six do this by focusing on individuals and institutions that used dissection in early modern Paris for scientific purposes. Chapters two, three, and four address how anatomists contextualized dissection through debates and developments in theory.
The second goal is to add complexity to the historical discussion. I have already mentioned a few ways the author does this in my comments above. However, my favorite is when she presents different sides of theoretical debates in an evenhanded way. While reading her book, I never had the sense that she wanted me to agree with one side or another on scientific issues, for example, over different views on mechanism or how sensation works. It would be easy to downplay or disregard one party over another with the benefit of modern science, but Guerrini does not do that. For that reason alone, I would argue that the author successfully meets her second goal.
The final part of this review reflects on Anita Guerrini’s comments in her introduction about non-human animals in historical scholarship. On page 15, she writes, “[b]y placing animals at the center of my study, I document and acknowledge the enormous role they played in the birth of the experimental method as well as in natural history and the reconfiguration of the human and animal body.” While non-human animals are an important part of her history of anatomy and dissection, they were passive participants. For example, in the numerous places where she discusses the dissection of exotic animals, her descriptions do not depict them as having any influence over their fates. Instead, she focuses on challenges anatomists faced. Anatomists struggled with finding available animals, say, from the king’s court, and with limited time before decay ruined their specimens.
The argument here is not that professor Guerrini’s mistake is making non-human animals passive participants in her book. The point of her book is to discuss anatomists in Paris, and, in such a situation, the non-human animals on which they did their experiments had no agency. Instead, the issue is that the author does not make non-human animals the center of her study, as she claims. She discusses them throughout her book, but her main attention goes to the anatomists, their debates, and the political situation in which they lived. The Courtiers’ Anatomists is an excellent book that is worth reading and deserves the awards it won. However, it makes me want to find historical writing that brings non-human animals into the center of the story, much like the Annales school brings the environment into the center and E. P. Thompson brings the working class into the center. Maybe I should read one of those “animal studies” Anita Guerrini mentions in the notes to her introduction.
