Featured on PDR in the collection Thomas Eakins’ Photograph of a Dissected Horse’s Leg (ca. 1885)

“I have long been dissatisfied with the account in standard works of the muscular action in animal locomotion”, Thomas Eakins writes at the beginning of “The Differential Action of Certain Muscles Passing More Than One Joint”. The essay, published by the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia, goes on to describe how its author jerry-rigged a plywood model of a horse’s leg — complete with catgut tendons and rubber bands for muscles — to better understand the relationships between its parts. Eakins also mentions dissecting both a live horse and a dead one for the same purpose, but leaves to the reader’s imagination whether or not the unfortunate creature(s) in question are in fact one and the same, on two separate sides of this mortal…