The Truth about Our Bones: William Cheselden's Osteographia

The Osteographia of William Cheselden (1688–1752) is universally recognized as one of the most important and beautiful books in the British anatomical tradition.1 Cheselden had two principal goals in creating the Osteographia: to provide the most accurate study of the human skeleton to date and to create the most attractive atlas of osteology available. By common agreement, he succeeded in providing a contender for both distinctions. Much has been written about the Osteographia and its place in the history of medicine, but little has been written about its engravings, which is surprising given that everyone who discusses the folio comments on their accuracy as illustrations and how striking they are artistically. My purpose in this paper is to begin a discussion of the engravings that at the same time places them within a larger epistemological and artistic context. Cheselden decided that it would be best to have his artists use a camera obscura to create the initial drawings for Osteographia. This decision would have seemed appropriate to him for a number of reasons bound up with the pursuit of precision and greater visual truth. The first half of the paper is devoted to the creation of the images. The second focuses on them as theoretical objects. In the second half I argue, by building a case on circumstantial considerations, that using a camera obscura creates viewing conditions that realize by analogy certain key doctrines of John Locke’s epistemology, and that this could have implicitly, or even explicitly, influenced Cheselden’s decision to use one. Creating a naturalistic representation of a complex object like a skull is a matter of artifice and convention (Figure 1). The principal trick is to render the three-dimensional world of experience—alive with light, colour and texture—into the two-dimensional world of black and white depiction. It is a testimony to the skills of an artist if this can be accomplished without the viewer commenting on the loss. In an engraving the artist creates the image