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Maerker's Florentine Wax Model

161 Words1 Pages
Maerker’s article presents a Viennese take on the utilization of Florentine wax models as surgical training tools in the late 1700s. It specifically addresses the benefaction of Austrian Emperor Joseph II – who (at the spurring of his controversial personal surgeon Giovanni Alessandro Brambilla) commissioned the wax preparations. The models were employed at the Josephinium military medico-surgical academy, which itself was a bone of contention, as it constituted one element of Joseph’s surgery-heavy health reforms. As surgery emerged from its layman, barber-surgeon guild status and became legally recognized as a liberal art, it faced hostility from traditional physicians, who were displeased by the comeuppance of “beardless bo[y]” surgeons,
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