Transcripts

SEA STACHURA: The naked woman on the cover of the Resurrection Trade has a Renaissance beauty. Her hair is quaffed, and she looks over her shoulder as though to a lover with a demure smile and large eyes. She's pregnant and stripped completely of skin. Leslie Miller says when she saw this image and others, she thought the women had to be real.

LESLIE MILLER: My first reaction to looking at these pictures was to feel skinned myself. When you look at them, it makes your body tingle and cringe because there's no skin on it. And you think about, you feel it viscerally, the skinning. But they also look so vulnerable.

SEA STACHURA: Miller says in the 18th century, studying anatomy, and in particular the brain and the womb, was the big thing in science. Trained artists took jobs as anatomical illustrators. They even did the dissections themselves.

Miller says this led to some interesting results. Artists rendered fetuses and genitalia with more beauty than accuracy. Rosy skin and pert breasts were drawn to give the image an air of life. Executed prisoners were offered to science, as were the bodies of people who died in poor houses. Miller was interested in the drawings of women, particularly pregnant women.

LESLIE MILLER: Women died frequently in pregnancy because it wasn't understood what was wrong in there. Naturally when they died pregnant, they were taken apart and these drawings were made. And they were made from real women in most cases.

SEA STACHURA: Miller's poetry collection is largely based on the images and descriptive text that were used as tools for science. In the poem Gautier D'Agoty's Écorchés, she considers the relationship one artist had to his corpses. She links it to a more contemporary reference, that of a strung up flayed rabbit.

LESLIE MILLER: Still wrapped in its bundle of muscle like a gift.

SEA STACHURA: Bodies weren't usually gifted to science, though. They were often stolen from graves and sold to anatomy schools. William Burke and William Hare are two infamous Scottish grave robbers.

LESLIE MILLER: They were so successful getting bodies that they actually finally decided that they could kill someone and bring a really fresh body. And this is really how they were caught, by killing someone in a boarding house where they were staying.

SEA STACHURA: This particular woman was sold to an anatomist named Dr. Knox. He preserved her in whiskey until a painter could represent her. And then she was dissected.

LESLIE MILLER: What happened after that, of course, was that people got angry with Knox, too, because it was the supply of the medical school that caused these guys to be so successful.

SEA STACHURA: Miller says she was struck by the objectification of women's bodies in stories like these and in the anatomists. She says their air of factualness and objectivity was false. She says doctors believed things like a girl could have blonder hair if she ate the yellow throat tendons of a calf.

Olive Miller's hunting around old texts of French anatomists actually began with her own pregnancy. Her son is now four. So she was relieved when amidst all of these artificial and stolen bodies she read about a French midwife, Madame du Coudray, who was hired by the King to teach midwives how to properly birth a child.

LESLIE MILLER: She went all over France for her entire life and trained these illiterate women with this machine she built. Basically, a model of a woman in labor.

SEA STACHURA: Miller says it was complete with umbilical cord and placenta. She says it saved a lot of lives. In the course of discovering these models and stories, Miller says she realized that defining something removes its purity. She says, really of any subject. Once you know, what and how, the beautiful mystery of it is obscured. I'm Sea Stachura, Minnesota Public Radio News, St. Paul.