Decaying corpses, flayed limbs, home laboratories—Rebecca Messbarger’s new book, The Lady Anatomist, has all the makings of a horror story. Yet as Messbarger demonstrates, these grisly items were merely the tools of a nearly forgotten trade: anatomical wax modeling. In this study, Messbarger chronicles the rise of anatomical dissection and fabrication in eighteenth-century Bologna and charts the fortunes of one of its foremost practitioners, Anna Morandi Manzolini. Celebrated in her day, Morandi has since nearly disappeared from the historical record. Why did that happen, and what makes her