An Atlas of Anatomy

'An Atlas of Anatomy: or, Pictures of the Human Body in Twenty-Four Quartro Coloured Plates Comprising one Hundred Separate Figures, with Descriptive Letterpress' by Mrs Florence Fenwick Miller, 1879.

















































In the last week, Columbia University contributed this 1879 anatomy atlas by Florence Fenwick Miller to the Biodiversity Heritage Library (and also to the Internet Archive). The lithographic illustration plates are a little stylised and simplistic at times, but the author states in the preface that although the book might prove useful for medical students and science teachers alike, the target audience was really school students.

The remarkable Florence Fenwick Miller (1854-1936) was a leading British suffragette (or is that suffragist?) and vocal supporter of women's rights, particularly in respect of education. She received her medical degree by the age of twenty and was a member of the London Board of Education. Her unpublished autobiography was shared by her family in the last decade and became the basis of a 2001 biography by Rosemary T. Vanarsdel: 'Florence Fenwick Miller: Victorian Feminist, Journalist and Educator'. [see also: one, two]

"Under exclusively man-made laws women have been reduced to the most abject condition of legal slavery in which it is possible for human beings to be held...under the arbitrary domination of another's will, and dependent for decent treatment exclusively on the goodness of heart of the individual master."
(FF Miller in a speech to the National Liberal Club in 1890) {source}