Authorship, image-making, and excess: William Hunter's Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata (1774)

Abstract

• In 1774, the physician-anatomist William Hunter (1718–1783) published Anatomia uteri humani gravidi tabulis illustrata/The Anatomy of the Human Gravid Uterus, Exhibited in Figures (1774). Issued as an elephant folio, the book is the culmination of twenty-four years of work and includes thirty-four plates with life-size hyper-naturalistic engravings by artists such as Robert Strange after drawings by Jan Van Rymsdyk. Anticipating potential critique of the book's stylistic choices, Hunter took pains in his preface to assure readers that although the book was lavishly illustrated, it was not excessively so, stating that he had ‘actually kept back several drawings which had been made, and two plates which had been engraved’. The decision to exclude these extra images was based on a desire ‘that the work not be overcharged’. On the eve of the 250th anniversary of the publication of Anatomia, this article takes Hunter's claim of authorial restraint as a departure point from which to examine the anatomist's construction of authorship within the illustrated book. Analysing the paratextual features of the book alongside previously unstudied contemporary reviews reveals how Hunter exerted rhetorical control over the production and reception of the book and its complex visual language. Through examination of the yet unstudied material remnants of the book's production, the drawings and prints Hunter excluded from the book are identified and examined to determine the extent to which Hunter's authorial control manifested in the material conditions of the book's production. Through the close analysis of Hunter's authorship within the context of eighteenth-century anxieties about excess, this article offers a new understanding of the production and reception of the Anatomia as well as the collaborative process of scientific image-making practices and book production in the eighteenth century.