| Sumario: | Henri Gervex's large oil painting Autopsy at Hôtel-Dieu (1876) stages a medical scene in which male identities are depicted through visible signs of social, educational and class difference. Through an examination of the historical particularities and contradictions of medical and artistic manhoods, this paper explores the dissection room as a social space of masculinity and examines the complex hierarchical relationships amongst men in the Parisian medical world. By analyzing nineteenth-century conceptions of artists, interns, orderlies and corpses, this paper argues that different types of masculinities were performed, mobilized, enforced and produced through visual representations as well as professional cultures and discourses.
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