A Visit to the Hunterian Museum, via Bioephemera

Apropos my current visit to London, check out this wonderful post on the London Hunterian Museum--old and new, as shown above--on the Bioephemera Website.

"Cow Poxed, Ox Faced Boy," 19th Century

I found this on a very nice website called "Medical Humanities Blog," which appears to have sourced it from the Wellcome Images Collection. The image was used as an illustration for a very interesting piece on the blog called "Imaging the Medical Humanities: Infection"; see the whole article here.

Image details: Cow Poxed, Ox Faced Boy - illustration to "Cow-Pox Inoculation No Security Against Small-Pox Infection" by W. Rowley. Coloured etching early 19th century.

Found via Wonders and Marvels.

"The Bruno Gebhard Papers," Dittrick Medical History Center, Cleveland, OH

The Dittrick Medical History Center in Cleveland, Ohio has joined the digital museum movement and begun to post images from their collection to Flickr! My favorite thus far: The Bruno Gebhard and German Health Displays" photo set from which these images are drawn. There's some great stuff up there, and much fascinating information; I highly recommend a visit. See the whole collection here.

About the photo set, from the Flickr page:

A set of photos from the Bruno Gebhard papers in the Archives at the Dittrick Medical History Center, at Case Western Reserve University, in Cleveland, Ohio. Gebhard was curator at the Deutsches Hygiene Museum, 1927-35, and first director of the Cleveland Health Museum, 1940-65. These images document exhibits mounted by Gebhard in Germany and the United States in the 1930s.

Association of Medical Illustrators Conference, July 16-July 20th, 2008

If anyone happens to be in the Indianapolis area next week, I will be presenting an illustrated lecture at the Association of Medical Illustrators Conference on Thursday, July 17th, at 1:15 PM. The presentation will cover the art and history or medical models, how they relate to the history or biomedical visualization, and my recent photo exhibition Anatomical Theatre.

On a related note, to get to the conference, I will be driving from New York City to Indianapolis, then home by way of Lexington, KY. Does anyone have any must-see suggestions either along the way or in either city?

Here is a full description of the presentation, from the conference website:

An understanding of early 3D models and teaching materials will provide historical review relating to the production and design of museum models, artifacts, and teaching aids. AMI members may benefit and gain insight into the role that 3D anatomical models play in contemporary medical illustration.

This lecture and Power Point presentation will feature photographs and imagery from pilgrimages to great medical museums of Europe and the United States. This presentation will focus on the art and history of medical museum artifacts, objects such as anatomical waxes, ivory sculptures, paper machŽ preparations, and preserved human remains, all created to teach medical students about visual diagnosis, anatomy, and the workings of the human body. The presentation will demonstrate, via lecture and images, that these artifacts communicate not only relevant medical lessons, but also function both as artistic and cultural objects. These museum pieces often represent changing metaphors with which the mysteries of the body have been understood, shifting ideas about how science should be presented. Also revealed in these models are understandings of gender, notions of the ideal versus the aberrant body, and evolving approaches to death. These artifacts contain an undeniable humanity and pathos that give the works the emotional depth generally attributed to artworks. This lecture will discuss preservational and sculptural methods; known artists of the genre, contextualization of these artifacts for a contemporary viewer, and review how these artifacts illustrate the history of medicine.

All Images from Anatomical Theatre Exhibition.

More images from Mysterious German Manuscript

Won't some kind soul please translate Stefan Nagel's online illustrated manuscript "Schaubuden: Geschichte und Erscheinungsformen" for me? The images are so good, I am dying to know the context.

For more on Nagel's manuscript, see this recent post. View the images in context here. See more images from the document in the Morbid Anatomy Library.

Update on European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences Conference

I discovered via the Biomedicine on Display blog that there is additional information available about the call for papers for the upcoming European Association of Museums of the History of Medical Sciences Conference (as discussed in a recent post here on Morbid Anatomy). Check out the website here; the due date for abstracts is April 15th.

All images from the Anatomical Theatre exhibition.

"The Papier-Mache Anatomist" Louis Auzoux, Curious Expeditions

Two of my favorite things in one blog post! First, anatomical models, in this case those of Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux. Second, New York City-Based purveyor of hair-art, anatomical prints, and yes, even a life-sized Auzoux anatomical model: Obscura Antiques and Oddities. Check out yesterdays Curious Expiditions post "The Papier-Mache Anatomist" for a great introduction into Auzoux's work and career, as well as a inventory of some of Obscura Antique's many charms.

Above images: Assorted models of Louis Thomas Jérôme Auzoux, most from the wonderful Phisick Antique Medical Collection website.

Comparative Anatomical Illustration, 1559-1626

From a nice post on the stylistic evolution of anatomical illustration found on the Medical Illustration Studio Blog.

"Danse Macabre," Saint-Saëns, 19th Century

The Danse Macabre, also known as the Dance of Death, Danza Mababra, danza della morte, or Totentanz (depending on you nationality), originated during the years of the bubonic plague (a.k.a. the black death) in the 14th century, and was intended to remind one that death would soon be coming for us, be we king, pope or commoner. The theme was explored in forms as diverse as poetry, visual arts (see above) and music. One of my favorite examples of the genre is a musical composition by Camille Saint-Saëns, entitled Danse Macabre, first performed in 1875.

Wikipedia has a wonderful entry on the piece; following are some of the highlights:

The composition is based upon a poem by Henri Cazalis, which itself is based upon an old French superstition:

Zig, zig, zig, Death in a cadence,
Striking with his heel a tomb,
Death at midnight plays a dance-tune,
Zig, zig, zig, on his violin.
The winter wind blows and the night is dark;
Moans are heard in the linden trees.
Through the gloom, white skeletons pass,
Running and leaping in their shrouds.
Zig, zig, zig, each one is frisking,
The bones of the dancers are heard to crack—
But hist! of a sudden they quit the round,
They push forward, they fly; their cocks have crowed.

According to the ancient superstition, "Death" appears at midnight every year on Halloween. Death has the power to call forth the dead from their graves to dance for him while he plays his fiddle (represented by a solo violin with its E-string tuned to an E-flat in an example of scordatura tuning). His skeletons dance for him until the first break of dawn, when they must return to their graves until the next year.

The piece opens with a harp playing a single note,and soft chords from the string section. This then leads to the eerie E flat and A chords (also known as a tritone or the "Devil's chord") played by a solo violin, representing death on his fiddle... The final section, a pianissimo, represents the dawn breaking and the skeletons returning to their graves.

Listen to (or download) a wonderful version from 1925, conducted by Leopold Stokowski here. The lavishly illustrated and lovingly compiled website Danza Macabre might make a nice companion piece.

Bill Hayes Reading from his Book The Anatomist, NYC!

I recently finished reading The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy. The book is a curious mix--as much a personal memoir as a biography, and much more of a biography of Henry Vandyke Carter, the illustrator of Gray's Anatomy , then of Henry Grey, about whom very little (apparently) is known.

In the process of researching his subjects, Hayes touches (conversationally and engagingly) on under-known facts of medical history, the world of contemporary medicine and dissection, the imaginative leaps of the biographer, and the drive of a very personal curiosity. I expected not to like the book--I think of the illustrative style of Gray's Anatomy as signaling the shift to the aloof, academic (read: boring and soulless) style of anatomical depiction; I was surprised by how much I did enjoy this book, and am pleased that the public at large seems interested as well.

Tomorrow--Tuesday February 19th--Hayes will read from The Anatomist at 192 Books at 7:00 PM. Find out more info here.

All images from Bartleby's online 1918 version of Gray's Anatomy. View all the illustrations from this edition here.

Mütter Musuem Interior, c.1890

Photograph taken at the college's previous location at Thirteenth and Locust Streets. From a postcard purchased at the Mutter Museum Giftshop.

Death and The Civil War

On NPR's Fresh Air today, Historian Drew Gilpin Faust will talk about her new book, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War.

This looks to be a fascinating book about changing ideas and cultures of death in America in response to the Civil War and its atrocities, made viscerally visible to the nation through the new technology of photography via the work of individuals such as Mathew Brady. Here is a small portion of an excerpt from the WNYC homepage:

Mortality defines the human condition. "We all have our dead—we all have our Graves," a Confederate Episcopal bishop observed in an 1862 sermon. Every era, he explained, must confront "like miseries"; every age must search for "like consolation." Yet death has its discontinuities as well. Men and women approach death in ways shaped by history, by culture, by conditions that vary over time and across space. Even though "we all have our dead," and even though we all die, we do so differently from generation to generation and from place to place.

Civil War Americans often wrote about what they called "the work of death," meaning the duties of soldiers to fight, kill, and die...Of all living things, only humans consciously anticipate death; the consequent need to choose how to behave in its face—to worry about how to die—distinguishes us from other animals. The need to manage death is the particular lot of humanity.7 It is work to deal with the dead as well, to remove them in the literal sense of disposing of their bodies, and it is also work to remove them in a more figurative sense. The bereaved struggle to separate themselves from the dead through ritual and mourning. Families and communities must repair the rent in the domestic and social fabric, and societies, nations, and cultures must work to understand and explain unfathomable loss.

This is a book about the work of death in the American Civil War. It seeks to describe how between 1861 and 1865—and into the decades that followed—Americans undertook a kind of work that history has not adequately understood or recognized. Human beings are rarely simply passive victims of death. They are actors even if they are the diers; they prepare for death, imagine it, risk it, endure it, seek to understand it. And if they are survivors, they must assume new identities established by their persistence in face of others' annihilation.

Read whole excerpt and listen to the interview here.

People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs 1913-1938

As I type this entry, I am enjoying the wonderful CD set People Take Warning! Murder Ballads & Disaster Songs 1913-1938.

It is a 3 CD set, packed into an illustrated book full of historical information about each song. There are three themed CDs--"Man versus Machine," "Man versus Nature," and "Man versus Man (and Woman too.)" Here is a sample of some of the songs you'll find here: "Titanic Blues (1932)" (one of about 5 other songs on this theme), "Memphis Flu (1930)," "Burning of the Cleveland School (1933), "Fatal Wreck of the Bus (1936)," "The Santa Barbara Earthquake (1928) , and "Murder of the Lawson Family" (1930).

Thanks, Herbert, for alerting me to this collection. And special thanks to Gerry Newland for buying it for me. You can download an MP3 from the collection and find out more here.

The Art of Medical Models, via Metafilter

Check out this great posting on Meta Filter about The Art of Medical Models. Make sure to check out the comments as well.

Photos from my photography show Anatomical Theatre, on the very same (wonderful) topic. More photos here and here.

Another Book For The Wishlist

I just found out about this wonderful looking book: The Anatomist: A True Story of Gray's Anatomy.

It is heartening (sic) to see anatomy increase its inroads into popular culture! Read more about the book here.