The Structures and Textures of Disease Made Printable: Matthew Baillie’s <i>A Series of Engravings … to Illustrate the Morbid Anatomy</i> (1799–1802)

This article interrogates how the visual foundations of observational disciplines were made by closely examining a unique set of historical materials that details every stage of the printmaking process for Matthew Baillie’s A Series of Engravings – from the original anatomical preparations, through the preparatory drawings and copperplates, to the final printed images. Focusing on this material demonstrates that the requirements of printmaking fundamentally shaped the visual appearance, epistemic content, and communicative properties of observational disciplines, in this case pathology. Baillie chose preparations “capable of being illustrated” and emphasized the suitability of his collaborators to produce reliable epistemic images. In turn, the artist William Clift used watercolor to produce naturalistic illustrations that emphasized key epistemic content for interpretation by the engravers William Skelton, James Basire II, and James Heath. The engravers then translated the watercolors into etched and engraved lines on copperplates that reproduced the salient features of Clift’s preparatory drawings while adhering to recognized epistemic and stylistic standards for scientific publications.