The Anatomist Anatomis'd takes seriously the oft-repeated but less frequently pursued call to write ‘big-picture histories’ – histories that cover a wide temporal and geographic scope. Andrew Cunningham's project examines anatomy across the ‘long’ eighteenth century and over much of western Europe, restoring to anatomy that which defined it before the nineteenth century but which has been ascribed to other disciplines (primarily physiology) by presentist historians looking backward. Anatomy, he argues, was an active discipline, experimental in nature, very much interested in discovery and new knowledge. Cunningham himself regards anatomy as a discipline during this period, and takes the discipline to be the subject of his analysis: he examines practices and beliefs, training and texts, and contexts within which knowledge was sought, developed and circulated for the discipline as a whole. This approach necessitates that Cunningham posit the existence of a community that looks quite modern in its constitution – ‘all academic disciplines today work as communities in this way’ (p. 72) – a community formed through correspondence and shared understandings that existed across Europe over a period of 150 years.

If Cunningham's ambitions are grand, he pursues them with suitably expansive material that makes the book accessible and interesting to students and other audiences outside the profession, who might be less inclined to appreciate its historiographical argument. Cunningham moves with facility between Paris, Leiden, Padua, Bologna, London, Edinburgh and elsewhere, often quoting at length from the anatomists he discusses. Significantly, he also includes a multitude of images, with over one hundred illustrations in the text. These are central to understanding both the place and the endeavour of anatomy, itself so dependent on visual representation.

While the text is written in a way accessible to students, there is much to recommend it to serious scholars. Cunningham's refashioning of the definition of anatomy requires that he attend both to rhetoric – what was called ‘anatomy’ – and to the actual practices of his historical actors. The book is divided into six chapters, on the identity of anatomy, training and teaching, experimental anatomy, bodies dissected and displayed, comparative anatomy, and the end of the old anatomy. Cunningham begins by describing the community of anatomists, its image and traditions, and the sacred ritual of dissection at the heart of it; he continues by describing both those who entered the field and the ways in which they did so. He examines how anatomy was taught, sometimes correlating practices with specific institutional and political structures. Bodies were more readily available, for example, in states where supportive rulers could by fiat grant bodies, whether from the gallows or the hospitals, to anatomists, whereas in London such corpses were often auctioned to the highest bidder; anatomists were more likely to work collaboratively in states in which there was royal support for anatomy teaching. Cunningham also attempts to uncover pedagogical practices at specific institutional sites and by specific instructors, describing the number of lectures given, the number of bodies dissected, the order in which dissections took place and lectures were structured, and the sorts of texts and sources that instructors themselves relied upon. This discussion of the ways in which pedagogy functioned in practice is thorough and original, and very important to the subject of anatomy at a time in which to be a practising anatomist was to teach anatomy; it is one of the greatest strengths of the book. When discussing the ways in which bodies were acquired, pictured and displayed, Cunningham goes into detail about the processes whereby preparations were created and about the practices and techniques of printing, as well as into philosophical debates over artistic license and idealization in anatomical atlases. Cunningham's detailed accounting for all that constituted anatomy in the eighteenth century serves what seems to be one of his central interests in the final chapter, about the demise of that anatomy and its replacement by several sciences taken to subsume it: physics and chemistry, physiology, comparative anatomy and experimental medicine and pathology. This demise and replacement is represented primarily as a product of institutional change in France, where the change is first seen and whence it spreads.

The book's length, detail and scope are lightened by an engaging style that recognizes both the humour and the macabre aspects to be found in the subject matter. But despite the book's many virtues, one reason that historians often call for but rarely write big-picture histories is that they so often tend to violate one or another historiographical sensibility. Cunningham himself recognizes flattening in his account: he presents ‘the state of anatomy over about 150 years in a somewhat static way’ so as to contrast it with what came after, ‘because anatomy here plays the role of a “before” picture in a “before and after” scenario’ (p. xxi). Definitions of anatomy and physiology posited in The Anatomist Anatomis'd help to counter one form of anachronism, but perhaps at the expense of perpetuating others – disciplines and communities are taken to be quite modern and universal in nature, holding steady across geographical, cultural and political divides, and across 150 years. One wonders, in fact, whether anatomy and physiology have precise definitions or true disciplinarity during the period, or whether the radical changes that occurred at the end of the eighteenth century involved the very creation of disciplines out of what had been imprecise subject areas, a lining up of modes of practice, epistemologies and training regimens. Such a possibility seems stronger given Cunningham's vague explanation for disciplinary change outside France. In the latter case, dramatic political and institutional changes neatly explain disciplinary reconfigurations, but then ‘these changes were taken up elsewhere in Europe, particularly in German states and, after the defeat of Napoleon, in Britain too’ (p. 382). It seems unlikely that a well-entrenched discipline, supported by a trans-European community, could be overthrown by osmotic transmission of a new configuration formed in very particular political circumstances, but more likely that such a configuration might replace a cluster of loosely defined subjects of study. Still, as Cunningham points out, the coincident secularization, fading of natural philosophy, rise of scientific expertise, and cordoning off of science from the public all point to a dramatic shift of events at the end of the ‘long’ eighteenth century – a shift exemplified so nicely in this discussion of the quintessential eighteenth-century natural-philosophical subject: anatomy.