The baby, stillborn, lies cuddled in the opened womb. The colors of the drawing, in contrast to the sadness of the clear deaths of baby and mother, are vivid, bright, and accentuated. The story behind the drawing, and the 15 others surrounding it in the hallway next to Pennsylvania Hospital's Historic Library, is sketchy but fascinating.

For the first time since the hospital received the anatomical drawings of Jan Van Rymsdyk 247 years ago, they are on display together. Much the same as manual autopsies did later and CAT scans, X-rays, and MRIs do today, the Van Rymsdyk drawings - made centuries ago in London - were highly accurate and became the basis for medical education and diagnosis in Colonial and then post-Revolutionary Philadelphia.

"We have historic treasures here and want the public to see what medicine was and has become," said Stacey Peeples, the curator and lead archivist at Pennsylvania Hospital and organizer of the Van Rymsdyk exhibit, which will be on display through the end of 2010.

"This was America's first hospital and it has always been on the cutting edge, whatever that was at the time," Peeples said.

Van Rymsdyk's work has held up over a couple of centuries. His drawings "are exceptional in their visual and stylistic approach to the representation of nature," said Aris Sarafianos, a lecturer in art history at the University of Ioannina in Greece, who will be speaking about the drawings as part of the hospital's lecture series on Jan. 7. "They reveal an unprecedented degree of veracity and minute fidelity to the depiction of the human body."

Sarafianos said the Pennsylvania Hospital images are similar to Van Rymsdyk's work held in other important collections, such as that of the Hunterian Museum at the University of Glasgow in Scotland, and "in certain respects are actually richer and more innovative."

While it seems hardly believable today, there were really few research vehicles for doctors during the 18th century. Religious objections, and even superstition, made opening up the body, even after death, an abomination. There were cadavers at times, but they generally were those of street people, criminals, or other lost souls. The idea of organ donation or of average folks, let alone highfalutin types, assenting to an autopsy for a friend or a family member was unthinkable. The body went to the grave whole, not in pieces.

Little is known about the genesis of the Van Rymsdyk drawings on display. Van Rymsdyk was apparently a Dutch immigrant to London and in demand as an illustrator. In his 20s or 30s - his birth date is uncertain - he worked on drawings for textbooks and medical journals, and sometime in the 1750s produced the crayon drawings that are reproduced for the exhibit.

There are six drawings of various looks at the stillbirth of the baby, starting from a pullback of the skin of the mother's stomach, onward to the opening up to see the organs, both of the mother and the baby, to the body with the womb removed.

The other set of 10 drawings is of a male. He appears to be standing, with a look first at his circulatory and nervous system. Successive drawings reveal his skeleton, his organs, and finally his genitalia. Peeples said it was likely that Van Rymsdyk made him look lifelike, though the corpse probably was splayed prostrate on a table.

"It is also somewhat sad to think of the woman and baby in those drawings," she said. "It might have been, say, a prostitute who was pregnant and died either in childbirth or late in her term. They might have found her on the street. It wouldn't have been anyone with money."

Ironically, the woman, who most likely died because she had little medical care, became the basis for the start of the uplifting of medical-education standards in America, Peeples said.

A British doctor, John Fothergill, who had befriended Benjamin Franklin when he was on his extended diplomatic missions in London, purchased the Van Rymsdyk drawings and in 1762 had them shipped over - with three plaster casts of a pregnant woman's stomach and organs - to, as he wrote, "be under the care of the Physicians & to be by some of them explained to the Students or pupils who may attend the Hospital."

Through the latter part of the 18th century, the drawings became most well-known as the visual elements for lectures by the hospital's most prominent medical instructor, William Shippen Jr., who had studied in London with the leading figure in British anatomy, William Hunter.

Shippen's lectures formed the foundation for starting the country's first medical school, associated with what would later become part of the University of Pennsylvania, in 1765.

Peeples said that it was not until the early part of the next century that the Van Rymsdyk drawings went into storage. As part of the exhibit in the nearby Historic Library shows (the drawings are on a wall in the oldest part of the hospital), it was not until the work of Edward Jenner and Louis Pasteur with poxes and microbes that medical educators started making more prominent in their courses the observations of diseases and injuries found in autopsies.

The drawings then became part of Pennsylvania Hospital's collection of medical instruments, literature, and artifacts. On occasion, Peeples said, one or another of the drawings went on display, but now, with the ability to reproduce them so well, they are being shown all at once for the first time, albeit as reproductions because the originals remain too delicate.

As for Van Rymsdyk, little beyond his work is known. He apparently had a decent career, as his work for other journals and books proves. But there is no record of his personal life; historians believe he stayed in London and died sometime in the 1790s.

Viewed simply as art, the drawings are comparable to the European realist paintings of the period, but given the knowledge that they contain, the CAT scans and "Visible Man" of their times, they provide a surprising look into the science and art that is the history of medicine.

"From Pastels to PDAs: Medical Education from the 18th Century to the 21st Century," featuring 16 drawings from Jan Van Rymsdyk, is on display from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. Monday through Friday at Pennsylvania Hospital, Eighth and Spruce Streets.

Suggested donation is $4; brochures  and a self-guided cell-phone tour are available at the hospital gift shop.  Groups of five or more must take  a guided tour given on Mondays, Thursdays, and Fridays and need  a 48-hour advance reservation.

For more information, call 215-829-3370.