The Lady Anatomist
The Life and Work of Anna Morandi Manzolini
- Contents
- Review Quotes

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Changing the Angle of Vision
1 The Pope’s Anatomy Museum
2 Professing Anatomy
3 Re-casting
4 The Lady Anatomist
5 Esse est Percipi: Hands and Eyes
6 Beneath the Fig Leaf: The Male Reproductive System and Genitalia
7 Cessio ac Venditio: The Final Years and the End of an Age
Notes
Bibliography
Index
“In The Lady Anatomist, Rebecca Messbarger shakes the dust of historical neglect from Anna Morandi Manzolini’s life and reclaims for her the international renown she enjoyed in the eighteenth century. Uncovering Morandi’s innovations in the realm of experimental anatomy, Messbarger analyzes the learned lady anatomist’s provocative representations of particular body parts in wax within a nuanced cultural history of Bologna’s scientific institutions. The Lady Anatomist is a story that needs to be told, filled with new, wonderful, and compelling material.” —Londa Schiebinger, author of Nature’s Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science
“This astonishing and greatly informative account . . . paints a rich canvas of the political, cultural, and scientific life of eighteenth-century Italy and Bologna specifically. . . . May this work have many readers!”
“Rebecca Messbarger’s Lady Anatomist is a wonderful, richly illustrated book. . . . Not only has Messbarger come up with new material on Morandi’s life, she also successfully manages to combine this with recent historiographical discussions on the importance of materiality and of doing hands-on science. . . . [The Lady Anatomist] offers a rich and valuable insight into eighteenth-century anatomical practices.”
“The Lady Anatomist is nonetheless a pathbreaking book and a major contribution to the histories of science, women and art. Beautifully written, thoroughly documented, and wonderfully illustrated, it is a pleasure to read.”
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