Assembly Instructions for a Human Being

The American buyer of an artificial man in 1841 was offered a precise assurance. Its 129 pieces could be removed within minutes, covering a table with anatomy. Putting everything back, the catalogue promised, would take less than ten minutes.

Henry Rawls & Co., the Albany agents selling Louis Auzoux’s French preparations, already had a customer who could demonstrate their usefulness. James H. Armsby, professor of anatomy at Albany Medical College, had received a large model the previous autumn. During his winter series of popular lectures, he repeatedly took it apart in the college’s anatomical theatre. The agents called this a dissection.

The body could be opened without being used up. Auzoux’s models exposed muscles, vessels and organs in sections that a teacher could remove, identify and return to their places. They were made largely from a paper-based compound, with metal inside and painted anatomy outside. Their usefulness depended on the next demonstration being possible after the last one had ended.

The six-foot man cost 3,200 francs, including his case and stand. A four-foot version cost 1,050. Both were advertised with 1,115 numbered anatomical details, besides smaller structures that had no individual number. The customer was buying a body, its means of support and a way of finding things inside it.

A doctor learns from another model-maker

Auzoux was born in 1797 at Saint-Aubin-d’ÉcrosvilleSaint-Aubin-d’Écrosville, France×A village in Normandy, west of Paris. Auzoux was born here and established the factory that made his anatomical models.Open in Google Maps ↗, a Normandy village west of Paris, into a prosperous farming family. He studied medicine in the capital. Anatomical models were already an established aid: wax could reproduce the colours and surfaces of flesh, and some wax figures had removable organs. Auzoux’s opportunity lay in making an object suited to repeated handling and manufacture.

An immediate predecessor was Jean-François Ameline, professor of anatomy at Caen. Ameline attached artificial muscles and organs to a genuine human skeleton. Parts could be removed layer by layer. Auzoux visited his workshop while still a student, and his own early preparation also relied on real bones.

The development took several attempts. In 1822 Auzoux presented a preparation of the pelvis and a lower limb to the French medical academy. A complete body followed in 1825, using manufactured bones instead of a natural skeleton. By May 1830 he had remodelled the figure so extensively that the academy’s subsequent report described the forms as completely changed and the details as more than doubled.

The report singled out the heart. It could be divided to reveal its chambers and valves, then reunited so closely that the joins were difficult to distinguish. The point was to preserve a relationship while making its concealed parts accessible. A student could examine a valve without losing the heart to which it belonged.

The term anatomie clastique described this separation into parts. Opening a model was built into its design, with an intended route back to the assembled body.

Anatomy in a Normandy village

In 1828 Auzoux established his factory in Saint-Aubin-d’Écrosville. A model’s prototype could provide moulds for further copies. Supplying another school no longer required inventing another body from the beginning.

A report delivered by A. Passy in 1835, later reproduced in the American catalogue, described sixty workers of different ages engaged in painting and modelling, with instruction accompanying their work. Passy marvelled at children speaking the vocabulary of anatomy in this rural setting. His account promoted the enterprise and its proprietor, but it also recorded an essential feature of production: the workers were learning the subject they were making.

Moulding and painting were different jobs. A vessel added to a limb had to take the right route; a removable muscle had to fit the parts beneath it. Anatomical instruction helped connect these separate operations. The factory also imposed a moral regime, with rules and fines directed against swearing and alcohol. Auzoux’s concern for his workers’ bodies extended to a gymnasium. Education, welfare and discipline occupied the same establishment.

Where to pull

The ordinary anatomical name was only one of the instructions attached to a model. Small printed numbers related structures to a separate explanatory table. Other marks told the operator how the manufactured object came apart.

At Berlin’s Deutsches Historisches Museum, conservators examined a small Auzoux man signed and dated 1851. Steel pins entered metal sleeves embedded in the adjoining pieces. The sleeves protected the paper compound from wear during assembly. Printed pointing hands marked joining points and the direction in which parts could be withdrawn. On one component, the designation 62.a matched a numbered connection to part 59.

An enlarged organ could be a lesson of its own. The eye’s layers could be separated and its transparent elements examined without the scale and obstruction of a complete head. Boerhaave’s collection documents the makers’ use of glass for transparent structures and parchment for translucent ones. Papier-mâché supplied much of the form, but it did not have to imitate every tissue unaided.

The model’s joints also explain some of its later damage. Before treatment, the Berlin figure had bent pins that prevented parts from being removed. Distortion and old repairs meant that its brain and internal organs no longer seated well enough for the outer hooks to close. A body designed for repeated opening could eventually become difficult to shut.

A closer look · 6:47 · English captions

Taking the paper body apart

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A body with terms of delivery

Rawls & Co. offered American customers the manufacturer’s prices, plus import expenses and a ten per cent commission. Orders were to be completed within sixty to ninety days. Their Albany catalogue combined a price list with favourable reports from French authorities and testimony from American doctors. A prospective buyer could inspect the cost and read the endorsements in the same booklet.

The ten-minute reassembly was an attractive promise for a teacher facing a tableful of detached anatomy. The numbers gave the pieces an order and a route back. Different sizes and generations of models contained different numbers of parts; buying the Auzoux name did not always mean buying the same body.

The agents addressed people who recoiled from the dissecting room, alongside medical institutions, colleges and scientific societies. Yet they explicitly denied that the preparations were intended entirely to replace the dead body. The academy’s recommendations included allowing practitioners to revise anatomy they had already learned from cadavers, and helping surgeons working far from large cities. Different audiences could use the same artificial body for different purposes.

In 1844 August Sebastian, an anatomist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands, persuaded the university board to allocate 1,700 guilders for an Auzoux model. It arrived in June. Sebastian soon used it for public lectures. The surviving figure has 130 separate pieces representing some 1,700 anatomical structures. The purchase brought a reusable demonstration into the university, with an audience extending beyond its medical students.

The horse needed its own anatomy

A request from the cavalry school at Saumur opened another field. In 1842 a young relative of Auzoux, an officer cadet there, wrote that the school’s professor of horse husbandry, the Marquis de Saint-Ange, would value a horse made on the principle of its human model. The existing dried and tarred equine preparations were in poor condition.

The horse required fresh anatomical work and consultation with veterinary specialists. Human anatomy could not simply be stretched into a different shape. The resulting model exposed superficial anatomy on one side and provided removable structures on the other. Its trunk opened into larger sections, giving access to relationships hidden beneath the muscles.

These were teaching objects for a world dependent on horses for transport, farm work and military service. They also travelled well beyond France. A historical photograph at Cornell brings an Auzoux horse into the same room as the Scottish veterinarian James Law and a large group of students. The model stands at the front, alongside the teacher.

The firm’s range extended further into natural history. Enlarged insects offered manageable parts where the original animal was small. A cockchafer could represent insect anatomy; silkworm preparations connected the study of internal structures to an animal raised for a valuable product. Different organisms required different sections, supports and changes of scale.

A fruit could be opened on the same principle as a body.

The botanical range turned seeds, flowers and fruits into structures large enough to examine separately. In this currant, the outer surface has been cut away to expose the arrangement inside. The preparations carried the firm into classrooms where the subject was plant anatomy rather than medicine.

Auzoux died in 1880, but the business continued. In May 1883 Joseph Maiden, curator of the museum whose collections now belong to Sydney’s Powerhouse, spent £212 on model bees and honeycomb. The bees could be taken apart, and the set entered a larger display about beekeeping, honey and beeswax.

The display remained in use for years. During the Depression in the 1930s, when visitors were seeking other ways to earn a living, the museum updated its presentation of beekeeping. The French models bought half a century earlier were still part of the lesson.