Il Teatro Anatomico di Padova
Reanimating
Anatomies
In 1595, late in the Italian Renaissance, an architectural innovation at the prestigious medical school of Padua changed how the human body was taught. It also changed how the human person was understood.
One of the things VR is used for often is reconstructing or simulating architectural spaces that are either lost or whose usage we will never be able to recreate.
The anatomy theaters of Renaissance Europe, prime among them the gorgeous examples littered across Italy, make for great use-cases.
Though tourists will always be welcome to pass through in exchange for a fee, historians of medicine will never be allowed to recreate the cold, winter-night, candle-lit dissections that sparked the thought of young revolutionary physicians like William Harvey... or later on Mary Shelley's Doctor Frankenstein.
Admittedly, that may be for the best.
Nevertheless, the app I've begun to design gives students and scholars of medical history a way into the great anatomical theater of Padua, to see how that space socialized the transmission and performance of knowledge.
Dividing audiences by status, class and gender but reminding them all of their common mortality, the anatomy theater was at once an embodiment of social hierarchy and no respecter of persons. High-status male medical doctors filled the bottom ranks and got the best views; medical students packed the middle rows; and noble-men (rarely noblewomen) could secure, for a sum, a chance to glimpse from a distance.
Recreating the poor lighting, hollow resonance, and almost infinite distractions of that space is core to the app's final concept.
Prototype developped for Prof. Evan Ragland's "History of Medicine" course, Spring 2021.
Designed in Unity for Quest 2 with modified animated models from Adobe Mixamo and a model of the space courtesy of Adam Heet.