In this thesis, it is studied and analysed the materiality used in the teaching of medicine at the University of Barcelona from the 60s of the 19th century to the 40s of the 20th century. In other words, the period of establishment and consolidation of a new university promoted by the Spanish liberal state and creation of a new educational model of medicine, where anatomy plays a central role and, at the same time, redefines its disciplinary contents. To perform this analysis, four cases have been studied, objects that have been preserved in the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Barcelona as remains of larger collections that were part of the Faculty's anatomical museum. This thesis thus proposes a double aspect: historical research and heritage recovery. There is, therefore, a will to construct an explanation based on the materiality that has survived the progressive abandonment, of the means with which a form of education was constituted that delimited the contents and forms of the discipline and its professionals. This configuration was carried out from a set of spaces, media and people who participated in the definition and contents of that form of education, while bringing different professionals to appear. Thus, the thesis proposes the study and analysis of a series of spaces (dissection room, museum, classroom, laboratory, workshop. . . ), teaching media (blackboards, projectors, glass plates, books, paintings, sculptures, glass bottles, posters, drawings, illustrations. . . ) and professionals (conservator and preparer, teacher, drawer, sculptor. . . ) with the aim of knowing how the teaching of anatomy was carried out. In this process, it is analysed to what extent didactics forms part of other practices (research, collection. . . ) through which anatomy is configured as a specialty throughout the period studied. This analytical approach brings both anatomical materiality (spaces, means, objects, practices) and its agents or users to the centre of the research. It is analysed how the human body is transformed into different objects of study and contemplation and how these objects transit through different spaces and between different agents. The natural preparations go from the dissection room to the classroom where they are used by the teacher as support for theoretical classes, or to the sculptor's workshop where they will serve as a model for the creation of artificial anatomical pieces for the museum, where there are also liquid-preserved preparations, which will be studied and drawn by the students. Anatomical illustrations, drawn from the natural, become indispensable support tools for the teaching of anatomy, both as part of textbooks and atlases, as posters and pictures hung on the walls or slides projected in the classroom. Illustrations, which over time become standardized, ceasing to have a particular style, which makes them repeatable and reproducible, the images thus cease to be ideal and become objective. In the teaching of this museological science that is anatomy, the public considered are the students of the Faculty: an official, controlled public. We can also find other audiences, even female, but always under the supervision of the teacher, who directs the looks. They are public, especially the first ones, who could also participate in other spaces in the city, where other ways of showing human anatomies configured other anatomical exhibition regimes. In these popular anatomical museums the same pieces were displayed as in the university ones, but here the public was more general and their looks and emotional reactions, could get out of control with respect to the views in the museum of the Faculty of Medicine.
| Date of Award | 25 Nov 2022 |
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| Original language | Catalan |
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| Supervisor | Alfonso Daniel Zarzoso Orellana (Director), Maria Isabel Morente Parra (Director) & Agusti Nieto Galan (Tutor) |
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