Medical illustration

Medical illustration is the practice of creating illustrations or animations to visually represent medical or biological subjects that may be difficult to explain only using words.

History

Medical illustrations have been made possibly since the beginning of medicine in any case for hundreds (or thousands) of years. Many illuminated manuscripts and Arabic scholarly treatises of the medieval period contained illustrations representing various anatomical systems (circulatory, nervous, urogenital), pathologies, or treatment methodologies. Many of these illustrations can look odd to modern eyes, since they reflect early reliance on classical scholarship (especially Galen) rather than direct observation, and the representation of internal structures can be fanciful. An early high-water mark was the 1543 CE publication of Andreas Vesalius's De Humani Corporis Fabrica Libri Septum, which contained more than 600 exquisite woodcut illustrations based on careful observation of human dissection.

Since the time of the Leonardo da Vinci and his depictions of the human form, there have been great advancements in the art of representing the human body. The art has evolved over time from illustration to digital imaging using the technological advancements of the digital age. Berengario da Carpi was the first known anatomist to include medical illustration within his textbooks. Gray's Anatomy, originally published in 1858, is one well-known human anatomy textbook that showcases a variety of anatomy depiction techniques.

In 1895, Konrad Roentgen, a German physicist discovered the X-Ray.