[Juenger-list] DIE SCHERE #68: Note 3: Goethe and the body snatchers

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DIE SCHERE #68: Note 3: Goethe and the body snatchers

Goethe enclosed his notes on plastic anatomy, written several days earlier, in a 
letter to Beuth in Berlin on 4 February 1832, just a few weeks before his death. 
He did so because he hoped to enlist the high official's help in an old pet 
project of his.
 
Goethe, an erstwhile Weimar minister for education and the arts, was convinced 
that the training of physicians has to include a thorough training of human 
anatomy. He expected that the demand  for corpses to be dissected in anatomy 
classes at medical schools would soon exceed the supply, which consisted mostly 
of the bodies of executed criminals. But executions had become rare in his 
enlightened times. That is why he feared that soon, as it had already happened 
in England and Scotland, tomb raiders and even murderers with a purpose would 
step in to satisfy, at a handsome profit, the ever rising demands of the medical 
schools. So he attached to his notes a recent lenghty press report on the 
activities, the trial and the execution of a gang of »resurrection men« in 
London. The sheer numbers quoted in this context illustrate vividly what 
gruesome point Goethe had. Within 12 years that gang of three men had procured 
and sold more than one thousand bodies, acquired either by digging up fresh 
graves or by outright murder of vagabond children and other lone victims.
 
However, Beuth replied briefly that in Berlin there was no lack of legally 
obtained corpses, neither for anatomists nor for artists. 

So Goethe's project came to nothing. What he had in mind was what is today a 
universally accepted training aid that, however, cannot altogether replace 
dissection of real bodies. He had learned of precisely sculpted and coloured wax 
models of parts of the human body that were kept at the Imperiale e Reale Museo 
de Fisica e Storia Naturale in Florence. His idea was to win the support of 
Beuth and the education authorities at Berlin to finance and send a delegation 
of specialists to Florence in order to make plaster copies of those wax models 
and to put them at the disposal of medical schools and art schools in Germany.
 
Goethe here argues that not only students of anatomy but also sculptors in 
training at art schools would profit from the introduction of such models. Why? 
Goethe's answer is taken up by EJ in #6. The sculptor learning his art and 
striving beyond the mere mechanical tricks of the trade will discover the 
mysteries of the human figure the more easily if they have already passed 
through an artist's imagination [both the craftsman who made the model and the 
one who copied it Goethe regarded as artists].
 
In other words, Gestalt is more easily comprehended by looking at an artist's 
representation of an object rather than by looking at the object itself.
 
So, according to Goethe, the American artist Duane Hanson's »photo-realistic« 
life-size woman in curlers pushing a supermarket cart might have a higher 
aesthetic value than its detractors would admit, for it reveals the Gestalt of 
that elderly and overweight middle-class type you meet in any mall any day 
without bothering about the mystery of her figure?