Padua's Anatomy Theater in VR
Professor Evan Ragland teaches Notre Dame students the history of medicine not as a series of data-points on a timeline but as a branching, evolving, and sometimes even recursive history of ideas, feelings, ambitions, compassions, and struggles. It's a visceral class – ask any of his pre-med students – as well as a fortifying intellectual exercise.
To help them understand how medicine was learned, taught, and revolutionized in sixteenth-century Renaissance Italy, at the dawn of medical modernization, Ragland teamed up with Navari Family Center for Digital Scholar postdoctoral fellow Arnaud Zimmern to reconstruct the groundbreaking anatomy theater of Padua in virtual reality.
The teatro anatomico – a novel architectural space for sixteenth-century universities – gave doctors, professors, students, and high-paying visitors a chance to witness a rare event: a live dissection. In the dead of winter (when smells and putrefaction were held at bay by the biting cold), viewers could gather round a dimly lit stage to see a surgeon unpack the human anatomy while chief lecturers and premier professors read aloud from the likes of Galen and Hippocrates.
"This really helped to see the perspective of the people at the time, and how the use of the anatomical theater changed with status. I couldn’t see a single thing up at the top, or hear — [I] had to go down to the front."
Helping today's history and pre-med students grasp how the architecture and soundscape of the Paduan theater heightened cultural caché and social status within the knowledge hierarchies of academic medicine, Ragland and Zimmern's reconstruction also reveals the infinite distractions and poor design decisions that made such learning spaces ironically an impediment to innovation and the pursuit of factual truth. Zimmern implemented a design feature that gave students a luxury that no Renaissance medical student would have had: the option to listen from the first floor or the top floor of the theater. "This really helped to see the perspective of the people at the time," one student in Ragland's Fall 2022 course observed, "and how the use of the anatomical theater changed with status. I couldn’t see a single thing up at the top, or hear — [I] had to go down to the front."
Padua's anatomy theater remains accessible to tourists, but no dissections will ever again be operated there. This project gives ND students a portal into its embodied past and, despite the shortcomings of the first version, Ragland has been thrilled with the results, noting that weeks after the VR visit "the students are still enthusiastic about the experience."
Architectural models by Adam Heet, animation/rigging, UI, and audio by Zimmern.
Made with Unity, SketchUp, and Adobe Mixamo.
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Immersive Technologies Program Coordinator, Hesburgh Libraries
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Prospect Research Analyst, Prospect Management
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