Gaze, Truth, Power: The Visual Crisis of Anatomical Science

Anatomy coalesced into a scientific discipline in sixteenth-century Italy with the revolution initiated by Andreas Vesalius, widely regarded as the father of the field. Its classical method—dissection of the human body—has since become an enduring universal emblem of medical education.
In The Birth of the Clinic (1963), the French philosopher Michel Foucault argued that modern medicine emerged at the end of the eighteenth century with the rebirth of anatomy through the lens of pathological science. The fusion of these two domains produced what he termed the anatomo-pathological method—an epistemic shift in the very structure of knowledge. At the center of his analysis stands a key concept: the medical gaze, which describes the systematic mode through which modern medicine observes the human body as its foundational methodology.
This gaze also heralds the de-humanization of the medical encounter, in which the patient is no longer perceived as an individual but as a clinical problem to be solved. In this lecture, I argue that the Vesalian revolution sowed the seeds not only for the emergence of the clinic and the anatomo-pathological method, but also for the visual crisis confronting anatomical science today. I will discuss the role of vision, the current state of anatomy in the world, at a time when Israel is now opening its ninth medical school, and possible avenues for addressing this crisis, including the role of the medical faculty sensu lato.
Assaf Marom, MD PhD, is a faculty member at the Technion’s Faculty of Medicine, which he joined after a postdoctoral fellowship at the Anthropological Institute of the University of Zurich. Assaf is an anthropologist whose research and teaching focus on human anatomy and evolution. At the Technion’s Faculty of Medicine he serves as Head of Anatomy and Academic Director of the Farkas Family Center for Anatomical Research and Education (CARE). To register, please send an email to: dorin@sni.technion.ac.il.