Medicine learns the body by opening it. The archive runs from Galen through Vesalius’s De Humani Corporis Fabrica (1543) — the figure flayed, drawn, laid flat, the surface exhausted to show what is underneath — down to the textbook still open on my desk. These works take that opened, legible body and ask what it becomes once it leaves the page: mirror-polished steel that hands the sky and the viewer back to themselves; silk that lets the figure dissolve into the light passing through it; angiograms painted out of the diagnostic moment and into a contemplative one. As a physician I approach the diagram not as iconography but as a living question — what the medical tradition lets us know about the body, and what it leaves out.
