The works of Thomas Gray

I would expect a man of his curiosity, intelligence, and obsessiveness to have looked at Gray's or Bell's Great Operations of Surgery (1821) with its color plates prepared by Thomas Landseer, the brother of the famous Victorian painter of animals Edwin Landseer, whose work Sickert would have known. There was Carl Rokitansky's A Manual of Pathological Anatomy, volumes I-IV (1849-54), George Viner Ellis's Illustrations of Dissections with life-size color plates (1867), and James Hope's Principles and Illustrations of Morbid Anatomy, with its Complete Series of Coloured Lithographic Drawings (1834). Had Sickert any doubts as to the location of the uterus or any other organ, he had a number of ways to educate himself without exposure to the medical profession. Because of the dismal state of forensic science and medicine in 1888, there were a number of misunderstandings about blood. The size and shape of blood spatter and drips meant very little to the Victorian investigator, who believed that a fat person had a significantly greater volume of blood than a thin one. Dr ...»