Wonderfully and fearfully made: How artists make anatomical bodies for medicine.

A one hour lecture followed by Q&A, hosted by performing Medicine’s Carly Annable-Coop. Part of Performing Medicine’s Open Programme.

In this online lecture, medical artist and sculptor Eleanor Crook presents a history of anatomical and pathological art, from drawing to prosthetics from the point of view of the makers.

The history of medical art is one of experiment and discovery, the beautiful and the morbid.

Over generations, inventive illustrators and modelmakers have attempted to understand what lies on the dissection table. A cadaver, is a confusion of detail, individual variation and mysterious structures, rapidly falling apart under the artist’s eyes.

What materials could describe it? What processes would be sufficient to explain it? What sensibility could convey its humanity? How could a pencil or a graze be sharp as surgical steel?

About Eleanor Crook

Eleanor Crook is a sculptor from the UK working internationally. Once an archaeologist she retained in sculpture in London where she specialised in anatomy, studying the body from an aesthetic and medical view, working from the living figure and (as a medical artist) in the dissecting room.

Her specialism is wax and bronze, using ancient processes in contemporary contexts, looking back in history to where are the roots of our current scientific ambitions and medical advances.

She is artist in residence at the Gordon Museum of Pathology and a member of the Medical Artists’ Association of Great Britain. She is an art and museum educator for the Clod Ensemble/Performing Medicine, Vrolik Museum Amsterdam, Camberwell School of Art and for Morbid Anatomy.