"The Slashed Beauty," Clemente Susini, circa 1790

The beauty of a woman is only skin-deep. If men could only see what is beneath the flesh and penetrate below the surface with eyes like the Boetian lynx, they would be nauseated just to look at women, for all this feminine charm is nothing but phlegm, blood, humours, gall. Just imagine all that is hidden in nostrils, throat and stomach… We are all repelled to touch vomit and ordure even with our fingertips. How then can we ever want to embrace what is merely a sack of rottenness?
--Abbot Odo of Cluny, 10th Century, as found in Marina Warner's Phantasmagoria

Image from Anatomical Theatre Exhibition; Caption: "The Slashed Beauty," La Specola (Museo di Storia Naturale), Wax model with human hair in rosewood and Venetian Glass case; Probably modeled by Clemente Susini (around 1790), Florence, Italy;" click here to see full exhibition. Text via Jenny Hood. To find out more about Marina Warner's wonderful book Phantamagoria, click here.

"Monsieur Vénus", Rachilde, 1884

In the Vénérande Mansion, in the left wing, whose shutters are always closed, there is a walled chamber.

That room is as blue as a cloudless sky, and on the bed shaped like a shell, an Eros of marble watches over a wax figure covered with transparent rubber. The red hair, the fair eyelashes, the gold hair of the chest are natural; the teeth that are in the mouth, and the nails on the hands and feet, have been torn from a corpse. The enameled eyes have an adorable look.

The walled chamber has a door hidden in the draperies of the dressing room. At night, sometimes a woman dressed in mourning, and sometimes a young man in evening clothes, opens this door.

One or the other kneels at the foot of the bed, and, after contemplating at length the marvelous lines of the wax statue, embraces it, and kisses it on its mouth. A hidden spring, installed at the inside of the hips, connects with the mouth and brings it to life.

This wax figure, an anatomical masterpiece, was fabricated by a German.

--Monsieur Vénus, Rachilde, 1884

So ends the lurid Monsieur Vénus, published by Rachilde in 1884, via a translation featured in Zone Books' The Decadent Reader: Fiction, Fantasy, and Perversion from Fin-de-Siècle France; Click here to find out more.

Image from cover of the wonderful book Flesh and Wax: Clemente Susini's Anatomical Wax in Cagliari University. Click here for more about this book. Click on image to see much larger and lovelier version.

A Humble Call for Anatomical Quotations

Following is a guest post--or plea, really!--from Mike Sappol, author of the wonderful A Traffic of Dead Bodies (Princeton UP, 2002):

In a recent issue of the New York Review of Books, I came across this quote from Guy de Maupassant:

" ...when you listen to people talking... It seems to me that I'm looking into their ghastly souls and discovering a monstrous fetus preserved in alcohol."
--Afloat (Sur l'eau) (1888)

Which got me thinking: Morbid A concentrates on visual evidence, but it's also good to collect literary and other historical references to anatomical specimens and dissections (which are evidence of how things morbid and anatomical were received and conceived and used). So here's a standing project for Morbid A subscribers and lurkers: If anyone out there has a quote relating to things anatomical, whether it's an anatomical image, metaphor or detailed description of an anatomical object or activity, send it on in to Morbid A (with as much citational information as you can stand to provide), for distribution to the morbid anatomical masses.
Anatomically and morbidly best, Mike

So! If anyone out there knows of any such quotations, please email them to me at morbidanatomy@gmail.com or enter them as comments on this post. I promise to collect and post the best of the lot!

Image: Rossiter, Frederick Magee, The practical guide to health; a popular treatise on anatomy, physiology, and hygiene, with a scientific description of diseases, their causes and treatment, designed for nurses and for home use. Washington, DC: Review & Herald Pub. Assn. [c1908] p. 46; Courtesy the National Library of Medicine