Includes 18 full-page color-printed mezzotints, 12 of the plates designed to fit together in threes to make four life-size human figures. Gautier credited Mertrud, the King's Surgeon with some of the anatomical work in this volume.

"Gautier's pictures seem to us to be in the tradition of the early gravida illustrations and the figures of Berengario and Charles Estienne—often attracting attention through sexual emphasis; dissected parts were placed within a living body usually possessing a lively face, whose expression is sometimes quizzical, sometimes erotically inviting, sometimes serene, always with a romantic and elegant hair-style. In one of Gautier's plates there are two naked women, one standing with emphatic breasts and issected pregnant uterus, the other sitting at her feet with open thighs so disposed as to exhibit her external genitalia. Such erotic figures may have also played a useful role in the sex education of physicians and others; they may be contrasted in their romantic extravagance of feeling with the matter-of-fact illustration in William Smellie's work (1754) an illustration that was often torn out by nineteenth century bowlderizers. (Most previous illustrations of this area, such as those of Leonardo or Vesalius, were remarkably inaccurate). The Gautier figures could, within the confines of anatomy, be quite tender, as in the fine plate in Anatomie générale...of a new born child, asleep but dissected, lying close to the recently-delivered mother, whose uterus has been opened for display" (Roberts & Tomlinson, The fabric of the hody [1992] 524-25).

Digital facsimile from e-rara.ch at this link.