418 
FLETCHER. 
There is a relation of anatomy to art which is seldom re¬ 
ferred to in didactic treatises, and that is the true delinea¬ 
tion of deformity. Nature is never inconsistent, but is har¬ 
monious even in deformity. “ For example,” says Diderot, 
“a wry nose is natural, if it does not offend us; we are led 
up to the deformity by little adjacent alterations, which tone 
it down and belong to it. But twist the nose of the Anti- 
nous, leaving the rest of the face unchanged, and you have 
an unnatural effect. The Antinous will not have a wry 
nose, but a broken nose.” An example of another kind of 
incongruity is to be seen in a picture by Burne Jones, where 
solemn faces, which remind one of Fra Angelico’s “ em¬ 
bodied ecstacies,” are joined to the bodies of joyous young 
bathers. 
The anatomical modifications produced by deformity or 
disease, and which are so admirably displayed in many of 
the paintings of the old masters, have been the subject of 
an able essay by the late Professor Charcot. He shows that 
photographs of convulsionists and hysterical epileptics 
strikingly recall the representations of those “ possessed of 
devils.” The earliest known drawings of an exclusively 
pathological character are found, strange to say, in a Japan¬ 
ese manuscript of the twelfth century, a copy of which is in 
the British Museum. * Various forms of disease of the skin 
are very well represented, and w 7 ould seem to have been 
drawm from life. The most noteworthy figure is that of a 
man whose mouth appears to be obliterated, and who is in¬ 
troducing food through an aperture in the region of the stom¬ 
ach. A gastric fistula, the result of accident, as in the well- 
known case of Alexis St. Martin, or produced artificially in 
cases of stricture of the upper part of the alimentary tube, 
or for the sake of observing the process of digestion in the 
laboratory, is supposed to belong to the present century. So 
here is again an opportunity for moralizing! 
Very few remains relating to anatomical art have been 
discovered of Roman origin. A marble figure of great in- 
* Anderson. 
