Exquisite Bodies

The Wellcome Collection on Euston Road has a nice caf, a tempting bookshop,a Gormley sculpture (and other artworks throughout the building),
and changing free exhibitions - the latest, Exquisite Bodies, shows wax anatomical models. Public displays of anatomy were, in the 1870s, open to women on separate days from when they were open to men, and there was widespread feeling that such sights were not fit for ladies' eyes.

An example, from the exhibition brochure, is in my Imagined Interiors book along with other aspects of the interior of bodies -
I'm always struck by the clarity of the anatomical drawing when compared with seeing the flesh-and-blood reality (that red stuff is a tummy-tuck operation, by the way; the green and brown are animal eyes). There's a distancing in the depiction - the drawing refers to "bodies" - but, somehow, not to "my body"; that is something I experience entirely differently, even though I know a bit about what's where and how the different systems work. The rational and the personal are different spheres.