Engravings and models. Produced in Freiburg in Baden in the 1850s to supplement the still sparsely illustrated textbooks, an authoritative atlas by the anatomy professor Alexander Ecker included ten copper plates on embryology. For such complicated structures as (a) the development of the human heart, Ecker worked closely with the modeller Adolf Ziegler to gain a three-dimensional understanding of the changing form. (b) Ziegler’s models were sold to accompany Ecker’s atlas. Model 5 (third from left) is about 12.5 cm high (with stand), and corresponds to fig. XX, which is 1.5 cm across.

(a) Engraving from Alexander Ecker, Icones physiologicae. Erläuterungstafeln zur Physiologie und Entwickelungsgeschichte, Leipzig: Voss, 1859, plate XXX (detail).

Balfour & Newton Libraries, Department of Zoology, University of Cambridge.

(b) The last eight of a series of 10 wax models on the ‘development of the heart in man’ by Adolf Ziegler after the work of Alexander Ecker, first offered c.1858.

Institut für Anatomie I, Universität Jena.

Display by the ‘plastic’ publisher. The apothecary and physician Adolf Ziegler began modelling embryos in the early 1850s as Ecker’s assistant, but in 1868 left his university position to start an independent studio. Styling himself a ‘plastic’, or sculptural, ‘publisher’, he worked after professors’ specimens, drawings and models, and always had these ‘authors’ approve ‘proofs’ of models that thus became indispensable to university teaching and even research. This catalogue photograph shows models selected (clockwise from top left) from series on the development of the human heart and of amphioxus, of human embryos of the first month, of trout and of chick. The authors’ names are prominently displayed.

Collotype by Römmler und Jonas of Dresden, from Wissenschaftliche Unterrichtsmodelle von Dr. med. Adolf Ziegler, Freiburg, c.1886.

Medizinhistorisches Institut, Universität Bern.