Things are (not) always what they seem. Animating scientific visualization: the case of anatomy

The voyage that humankind began in the 16th Century towards scientific knowledge is most fascinating. Interestingly, the quest for knowledge to Modernity followed with equal intensity two apparently opposite directions. As the discovery of the New World was opening the way to a season of explorations of unknown far away places, another journey started taking place towards a different uncharted territory: the inside of the human body. The ways devised to record and disseminate the findings of such parallel explorations still stand among the most sophisticated and interesting instances of technical and scientific visualization. Following an overview of some of the key steps in this history, this article focuses on the evolutionary path to anatomical and medical visualization. From the early great anatomical atlases of the past – Vesalius, Albinus, Hunter – to their contemporary counterparts. From Dr. Fritz Kahn’s medical popularization books, the walk-in large exhibits of the kind Will Burtin designed for Upjohn in the 1960’s, to the medical illustrated atlases by Dr. Frank H. Netter. We will then move to examine other approaches to the dynamic representation of the inner workings of the body, from medieval paper flap models to contemporary Virtual Reality interactive 3D anatomical models, through what UK animators Halas & Batchelor described in 1949 as animation’s “penetration” principle: the capacity to present the internal workings of an organism. We will symbolically close our journey by discussing the cornerstone 1968 scientific documentary Powers of Ten by the American designers Ray and Charles Eames.