Cheselden's Osteographia (1733): Bones Drawn Through a Camera Obscura

A cat and a dog, as skeletons, still quarrelling. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

In one of the headpieces of William Cheselden's Osteographia, or The Anatomy of the Bones (London, 1733), the skeletons of a cat and a dog square off and hiss at each other. Elsewhere a bear's skeleton tries to climb a hollow tree, a crocodile's rests in the desert beside a pyramid, and a bat hangs from a beam by its "fingers" while a sparrow looks on. It is a playful anatomy book — and an exact one.

The surgeon

William Cheselden was born on October 19, 1688, at Somerby, near Burrow-on-the-Hill in Leicestershire. By 1703 he was studying in London under the anatomist William Cowper and apprenticed as a surgeon at St Thomas's Hospital; by 1711 he was lecturing in anatomy, first privately and then at St Thomas's, where he became a surgeon in 1718. As a surgeon he was best known for his operation for "the stone," for which he invented a new method. His Anatomy of the Humane Body (1713) became a standard textbook, running through 16 English and American editions up to 1806. He died in Bath on April 10, 1752, and is buried at the Chelsea Hospital.

The book

The Osteographia is a grand folio of human and animal bones in copperplate engravings. Cheselden showed every bone of the human body separately at life size, "and again reduced in order to shew them united to one another." With his engravers, Gerard van der Gucht and a Mr. Shinevoet, he made many of the drawings with a camera obscura — a darkened box that projects an image to be traced — and the title page shows it in use: two men adjust a skeleton hung upside down from a tripod while a third looks through the camera.

It was probably printed for Cheselden by William Bowyer. And, like so many large anatomical atlases of its time, it failed financially: his appeal for subscribers met "with little success."

The title page. Below, a skeleton hangs from a tripod to be traced through a camera obscura. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The frontispiece: a classical figure, perhaps Galen, contemplating a skeleton in a pastoral landscape. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

Three skeletons in classical poses — one contemplating a skull, one leaning on a staff, one as if weeping. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

The animals

A deer. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

A monkey, seated as if deep in thought. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

A crocodile beside a pyramid. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

A bear climbing a hollow tree. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

A sparrow and a bat. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

A chameleon, its tail wrapped round a branch. Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

A "water tortoise." Photograph: National Library of Medicine.

Sources

• National Library of Medicine, Historical Anatomies on the Web: William Cheselden, Osteographia, or The Anatomy of the Bones. Further reading there: K. F. Russell, British Anatomy, 1525–1800, and his "The Osteographia of William Cheselden," Bulletin of the History of Medicine 28.