Michael Sappol

EURIAS Fellow, SCAS.
Independent scholar, emeritus, U.S. National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD

Michael Sappol was born in Queens, New York. A longtime resident of New York City and
Washington, DC, he has recently relocated to Stockholm. For many years, he was a historian,
exhibition curator and scholar-in-residence at the History of Medicine Division of the U.S. National
Library of Medicine. He has also been a Fellow at the American Antiquarian Society, the Clark Art
Institute, and the College of Physicians of Philadelphia.

Sappol’s scholarly work focuses on the history of anatomy, death, and the visual culture and
performance of medicine in film, illustration, and exhibition. He is the author of A Traffic of
Dead Bodies: Anatomy and Embodied Social Identity in Nineteenth-Century America
(2002)
and Dream Anatomy (2006), editor of A Cultural History of the Human Body in the Age of
Empire
(2012) and Hidden Treasure (2012), and curator of the Medical Movies: Historical Films
from the Collection of the U.S. National Library of Medicine website. His latest work, How to
Get Modern with Scientific Illustration: Fritz Kahn and the Visual Rhetoric of Modernity, 1916–
1960
, will be published by the University of Minnesota Press in early 2017.

At SCAS, Sappol will be working on a new project: ‘Anatomy’s Photography: Objectivity, Show-
manship & the Reinvention of the Anatomical Image, 1850–1920’.

This information is accurate as of the academic year 2016-17.