National Library of Sweden, MS X 118 (by kind permission)

These two figures are from the Stockholm roll, made of six skins of parchment sewn together, five metres long, and written and illustrated in London around 1430. The written text on one side of the roll is De Arte Phisicali et de Cirurgia, attributed to the English fourteenth-century surgeon, John Arderne. The text is devoted to remedies for various bodily ills and contains no anatomical information. Besides the anatomical figures, which in some cases are related to the ‘body-systems’ series seen in Gonville and Caius MS 190/223, there are series related to Arderne’s operation for fistula-in-ano, and presentations of the child in the womb at full term, as well as many marginal illustrations related to the remedy text.

The two figures shown represent the human body seen from front and back as if cut longitudinally down the middle of the skull and trunk of the body. This view of the body was pioneered in an illustration to the anatomical part of the surgery written by Henri de Mondeville. It does not seem to have been favoured by later illustrators of anatomy.

The front view is painted on the written side of the roll in the middle of the text, the rear view is on the other side of the scroll directly opposite – as if the scroll itself was cutting a dissected corpse in the horizontal plane. Although the organs represented within the chest and belly are clearly delineated, they do not seem to record the result of an actual dissection. Some organs are fancifully combined and positioned, particularly in the front view. We see a combined heart and lungs, the kidneys in a very low position and the gallbladder painted on the front of the liver. The lungs, heart and liver are more realistically placed in the back view, and the kidneys are closer to their actual position. The message of the two pictures may have been to show that whereas the head is symmetrical, the distribution of the organs in the rest of the body is not.

Peter Murray Jones