Hogarth etching
The Reward of Cruelty, from The Four Stages of Cruelty, February 1750/1

Dissection of the human body—always a fraught business in any society—was for much of its history not primarily a technical process conducted for teaching, research or autopsies. Nor were dissections most commonly undertaken in the privacy of dissecting rooms in medical institutions. Rather, the opening up of a body was a ritual act, a performance staged for particular audiences within carefully monitored frameworks of legal and religious regulation. The most prominent dissections were staged as public or semi-public performances in specially constructed 'theatres' (the term still used for the room in which operations are conducted in modern hospitals). The audience was as likely to consist of curious non-specialists as aspiring or actual members of the medical profession, and the interior wonders of the body were rendered open to view in sequence according to a pre-determined choreography. The professor acted as the master of the performance, which was generally conducted according to the plot of a set text that was being read out loud to the eager press of spectators. The actual acts of cutting might well be performed by a practical dissector rather than the august professor himself, especially in the earlier centuries. Such staged events, exuding an exciting aura of wonder and morbid fascination, are a far cry from the low-key privacy and professional exclusivity of the modern dissecting room in a medical school.

...the self-conscious successors to Vesalius in Holland were also responsible for theatrical dissections, performed annually as part of the public jamboree of Carnival. The character of the spaces for public dissection can be seen in prints of the anatomy theatre at Leiden [below] which also served as a venue for curious visitors outside the anatomy season. The Leiden theatre regaled the visitor with a striking parade of human and animal skeletons, some of which bore mottoes on banners reminding the spectators of their own transient mortality. It was a context that stressed the role of anatomy as a science that was as much philosophical as practical, a matter of meaning as much as medicinal intervention.

The permanent anatomy theatre became an architectural genre in its own right, and a conspicuous feature in a number of European seats of learning. Its canonical form consisted of tightly packed tiers of circular or elliptical balconies steeply disposed in the shape of an inverted cone. Each platform was just wide enough to accommodate a file of standing spectators, who would be granted a vertiginous view of the corpse below.

Anonymous engraving
The Anatomy Theatre at Leiden, c. 1700