The Wonderful Public Domain Review Needs Your Help!

The Public Domain Review is by far one of my favorite things on the internet; this not-for-profit project "dedicated to showcasing the most interesting and unusual out-of-copyright works available online" mines the "rarities and curiosities" of the public domain with richly illustrated articles by a variety of writers, scholars and curators including our own Colin Dickey, co-editor of the upcoming Morbid Anatomy Anthology.

Just to give you a sense of the breadth and quality of their findings--which are especially strong in the areas of the strange and esoteric, the macabre, anatomy, and early science--I have cherry picked a few of my favorite images (see above) drawn only from their current front page stories of the website. Click here to see many, many more, and find out more about their context. 

In order to continue operating, the Public Domain Review needs to raise $20,000 by April 30th; as of this writing, they have raised $16,618. Please consider joining me in supporting this beautifully done and highly worthy website by clicking here.

More on the fundraising attempts, from their own words:

With our initial funding now come to an end, we need your support to help us continue our mission – to promote the public domain as an indispensable public good, and to curate and showcase the most interesting out-of-copyright works on the web.

We’ve come a long way since our humble beginnings in 2011. Over the course of our two years we’ve created a large and ever growing archive of some of the most interesting and unusual artefacts in the history of art, literature and ideas – from Gerard Manley Hopkins’s soaring meteorology of volcano sunsets, to 19th century French postcards of the year 2000; from Thomas Browne’s list of imaginary artefacts, to Napoleon’s Book of Fate.

As well as surfacing public domain rarities and curiosities from the world’s archives, we’ve provided a platform for leading writers, scholars and curators to show the things that they love to new audiences. Highlights of the last year include an article by Man Booker prize winner Julian Barnes, copious praise from lots of our favourite people and projects, and mentions in the New York Times, the Huffington Post, the Paris Review and Vice magazine.

But to carry the project on into the future we need money, and so we’re turning to our community of readers for help. With your support we can continue to tell the world about the importance of the public domain, and help to bring its most exquisite and unusual spoils to more people than ever.

How much do we need?

We’ve worked out that a sum of $20,000 will enable us to continue on into 2014. We are growing apace and the more and more people we have enjoying what we do, the easier it is going to be to carry on in the future. We need support now to break through to this next stage.

What are our plans?

As well as continuing to bring you rare and wondrous gems from the history of art and literature, we have lots of new ideas that we want to bring to fruition. Here are just a few of the exciting things we have planned for the coming year and beyond:

• Implementing beautiful and useful new ways of displaying and searching the content.
• A new section on the site that will more actively celebrate and promote those cultural institutions that have decided to make available their content in an open and unrestrictive way.
• Initiatives to bring as-of-yet undigitised rare and curious public domain works online.
• Printed themed volumes – hand-picked, encyclopedic collections of images, articles and textual fragments on different themes.
• The creation of beautiful new editions of rare and out-of-print works, including the commissioning of new introductory essays, translations and illustrations.

We need your help to make these happen. If you enjoy the website and would like to see it continue, please give what you can afford to help keep us going!

The Midnight Archive Episode 1: Modern Day Mummies, Online and Available for Viewing!

The Midnight Archives: Tales From the Observatory is a new web-based documentary series "centered around the esoteric and always exotic personalities that spring from Observatory," the Brooklyn-based event/gallery space I run with a handful of other collaborators. The series is created and directed by film-maker Ronni Thomas, who has plans to upload approximately one new episode per week to the new Midnight Archive website.

Episode one, entitled Modern Day Mummies--which documents the work of Sorceress Cagliastro, our esteemed Observatory mummification instructor--has just been uploaded and is now available for viewing! You can check out the video above, but make sure to keep visiting The Midnight Archive website (which can be found here) or sign up for their mailer in order to catch exciting, soon-to-be-uploaded episodes featuring such Observatory luminaries as anthropomorphic taxidermy teacher Sue Jeiven, automaton keeper Jere Ryder, and occult walking tour mastermind Mitch Horowitz. You can get a sense of some of the other pieces and personalities you have to look forward to by viewing the teaser on Boing Boing by clicking here.

And, just a quick FYI: We have a few last openings for Sorceress Cagliastro's next mummification class, which will take place October 9th; if you are interested in enrolling, please email me at morbidanatomy [at] gmail.com; more on the class can be found here.

"Books and Babies: Communicating Reproduction," Exhibition, Cambridge University Library, Through December 23, 2011

Picture books teach children the facts of life. We are always reading about reproduction. Reproduction also describes what communication media do—multiply images, sounds and text for wider consumption. This exhibition is about these two senses of reproduction, about babies and books, and the ways in which they have interacted in the past and continue to interact today. Before reproduction there was generation, a broader view of how all things come into being than passing on the blueprint of a particular form of life. Before electronic media there were clay figurines, papyrus, parchment, printed books and journals. The interactions between communication media and ideas about reproduction have transformed the most intimate aspects of our lives.

This from the new exhibition "Books and Babies: Communicating Reproduction," which will be on view at Cambridge University Library through December 23, 2011. For those of you who are unable tovisit in person (like myself!), you can console yourself with the excellent web exhibition--from which the above images are drawn--by clicking here. You can find out more about visiting the exhibition here.

Thanks to Nick Hopwood and Eric Huang for sending this to my attention!

Images:

1. Aristotle’s Works: containing the Master-Piece, Directions for Midwives, and Counsel and Advice to Child-Bearing Women. With various useful remedies (c.1850). Private collection, frontispiece and title page
2. From Omnium humani corporis… (1641), an anatomical booklet made up of woodcut illustrations copied from earlier books under the supervision of Walther Ryff, a prolific producer of texts intended for a broad range of readers.
   
3. Plate from Cesare Lombroso's textbook L’Uomo Delinquente ... (1889)

"Most Horrible & Shocking Murders: Murder Pamphlets in the Collection of the National Library of Medicine" Website Launch

Michael Sappol--friend of Morbid Anatomy and historian in the History of Medicine Division of the National Library of Medicine--has just alerted me to the launching of a new website based on his recent exhibition documenting the rich and quirky collection of murder pamphlets in the collection of the National Library of Medicine.

From the press release:

A new website, "Most Horrible & Shocking Murders: Murder pamphlets in the collection of the National Library of Medicine," has been launched by the National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library. The site features a selection of murder pamphlets from the late 1600s to the late 1800s-from a treasure trove of several hundred owned by the Library.

Ever since the invention of movable type in the mid-1400s, public appetite for tales of shocking murders-"true crime"-has been one of the most durable facts of the market for printed material. For more than five centuries, murder pamphlets have been hawked on street corners, town squares, taverns, coffeehouses, news stands, and bookshops.

These pamphlets have been a rich source for historians of medicine, crime novelists, and cultural historians, who mine them for evidence to illuminate the history of class, gender, race, the law, the city, crime, religion and other topics. The murder pamphlets in the NLM's collection address cases connected to forensic medicine, especially cases in which doctors were accused of committing-or were the victims of-murder.

You can visit the website--which I designed, in fact!--by clicking here. All of the above images are drawn from the "pamphlets" section of the website, which contains these images along with a wealth of others; click here to peruse that section. Mr. Sappol is also the author of perhaps my favorite book about anatomical illustration, the incomparable "Dream Anatomy," which you can find out more about--and order!--by clicking here.

Thanks, Mike, for doing such wonderful work, and for alerting me to its launch!

Wax Anatomical Model of a Female Showing Internal Organs, Francesco Calenzuoli, Florence, 1818; Wellcome Collection at the Science Museum

This anatomical wax model shows the internal organs in a female torso and head, including the lungs, liver, stomach, kidneys and intestines. Complete with the veins and arteries, the heart is entirely removable. The figure was made by Francesco Calenzuoli (1796-1821), an Italian model maker renowned for his attention to detail. Wax models were used for teaching anatomy to medical students because they made it possible to pick out and emphasise specific features of the body, making their structure and function easier to understand. This made them especially useful at a time when few bodies were available for dissection. The model was donated by the Department of Human Anatomy at the University of Oxford.

Object number: 1988-249

Yet more (recent posts here: 1, 2, 3) riches from the London Science Museum's magnificently inexhaustable Brought to Life web exhibit. You can see much, much more by clicking here. Also, please click on images to see them in their full large-scale glory.

Morbid Anatomy Slideshow on American Medical News Website

The space where medicine and art intersects is often … well, weird. And fascinating. That realization is explored in the Morbid Anatomy Blog, written by Joanna Ebenstein, a graphic designer and photographer in Brooklyn, N.Y. One goal, Ebenstein says, is “to bring the art and history of medical museums to the awareness of a wider audience and to frame their artifacts as artistic and cultural objects with as much to say about their makers and the culture their makers inhabited as about medical knowledge...”

The American Medical News--a national trade publication for physicians published by the American Medical Association--just launched a nice little Morbid Anatomy slideshow on their website. If you are interested in seeing a nicely curated selection of images from the greater Morbid Anatomy project, and/or in learning a bit more about the stories behind these artifacts and spaces, I highly recommend you check it out!

You can access the slideshow by clicking here.

"An Iconography of Contagion," Web Exhibition, National Library of Medicine

About a hundred years ago, public health took a visual turn. In an era of devastating epidemic and endemic infectious disease, health professionals began to organize coordinated campaigns that sought to mobilize public action through eye-catching wall posters, illustrated pamphlets, motion pictures, and glass slide projections...

Check out the National Library of Medicine's wonderful new web exhibition "An Iconography of Contagion"--which explores the relationship between posters and public health, and from which all of the above text and images were drawn--by clicking here. Curated by Friend-of-Morbid-Anatomy Michael Sappol, this is a characteristically smart, thoughtful, and visually rich exhibition.

You can see the entire exhibition, and read the full text and full image captions, by clicking here. You can see many more wonderful images in the gallery section by clicking here. Click on images above to see much larger, richer versions.

Image Credits:

1. She may be…a bag of TROUBLE. Syphilis – Gonorrhea., U.S. Public Health Service, United States, 1940s. Photomechanical print: color; 41 x 51 cm. Artist: “Christian.”
2. Ali si zdrav? (Are you healthy?), Golnik, Slovenia, Yugoslavia, 1950s. Photomechanical print: color; 42 x 60 cm.
3. Tuberkulose undersøgelse – en borgerpligt (Tuberculosis examination – a citizen’s duty.), Copenhagen, Denmark, 1947. Color lithograph; 62 x 85 cm. Designer/artist: : Henry Thelander (fl. 1902-1986). Lithographers: Andreasen & Lachmann.
4. Tuberculosis bacilli. Chinese Anti-Tuberculosis Association, Shanghai, 1953.
5. La course a la mort. (The race with death.) Ligue Nationale Française contre le Peril Vénérién, France, ca. 1926. Color lithograph; reproduction of a pastel drawing; 69 x 88 cm. Artist: Charles Emmanuel Jodelet (1883-1969).

Introducing www.moulagen.de, Soon to be the On-Line Moulage Encyclopedia

Moulages are three dimensional teaching aids in wax... Like a plastic textbook, the moulages represented the appearance of diseases highly true to nature. In the 2nd half of the 20th century many moulage collections were neglected, forgotten or even destroyed as outdated objects for teaching. Today moulages face quite a renaissance worldwide. As visually telling objects they are used in medical exhibitions and art shows as well as in medical teaching contexts.

The Berliner Medizinhistorisches Museum der Charité has just launched a new web-initiative called www.moulagen.de; the website seeks to create, via user participation, an online, accessible database of all known moulage collections, and to connect the various people who work with moulage--such as curators, restorers, artists, curators, enthusiasts and scholars--with one another and to encourage the sharing of resources, tips, and news within the community. The site will ultimately be in German and English, though the English parts of the site are somewhat limited at the moment.

I was lucky to see enough to see the people behind this website--Thomas Schnalke, Isabel Atzl and Navena Widulin--present an inspiring lecture on the project at the recent "Wax Moulages as Cultural Artefacts" conference in Dresden, and I really admired their enthusiasm and vision, and the scope of what they proposed. If you have or work with a moulage collection, I urge you to visit the website and fill out their brief questionnaire (scroll down to the bottom to find both an English and German version) to participate in the building of this wonderfully conceived database project.

If you are fan of moulage, stay tuned; one hopes that, down the road, this website will become the definitive portal for learning about moulage and discovering the incredible moulage collections--such as le Musée des moulages de l'hôpital Saint-Louis in Paris, pictured above--that still exist around the world.

Here is more about the project, in Thomas' words:

Welcome to www.moulagen.de

Moulages are three dimensional teaching aids in wax. They were largely used between 1850 and 1950. Starting from Europe, there were soon many clinics worldwide collecting, keeping, and presenting sometimes thousands of these objects in specific collections. Like a plastic textbook, the moulages represented the appearance of diseases highly true to nature. In the 2nd half of the 20th century many moulage collections were neglected, forgotten or even destroyed as outdated objects for teaching. Today moulages face quite a renaissance worldwide. As visually telling objects they are used in medical exhibitions and art shows as well as in medical teaching contexts.

There are quite a few aims of this site: It should make more information on moulages and the art of moulaging available, plus it wants to introduce the interested audience to various specific collections. In addition, all current activities, such as exhibitions or research projects connected with moulages, should be listed. With indicating relevant literature and links we want to encourage others to deepen their interest in and work on and with moulages.

If you want to register your moulage collection in this portal, please go to our website www.moulagen.de, download and fill in the questionnaire and send it back to us via E-mail. Thank you very much for your contribution!

Thanks again for your help.
Best wishes
Thomas

Herzlichen Willkommen auf www.moulagen.de!

Moulagen sind ursprünglich medizinische Lehrmittel, deren Nutzung vor allem zwischen 1850 und 1950 weit verbreitet war. Deutschland- und europaweit verfügten viele Kliniken über große Sammlungen mit mehreren tausend Moulagen, die wie ein Lehrbuch Krankheitszeichen naturgetreu darstellten. In der 2. Hälfte, des 20. Jahrhunderts gerieten viele Sammlungen in Vergessenheit oder wurden als unzeitgemäße Lehrobjekte zerstört. Heute erleben Moulagen eine große Renaissance, werden als anschauliche Objekte in medizinische und künstlerische Ausstellungen integriert, wieder als Lehrmittel eingesetzt oder gar neu angefertigt.

Ziel dieser Seite ist es zum einen, Informationen zu Moulagen zu vermitteln und zum anderen einzelne Sammlungen vorzustellen. Außerdem sollen aktuelle Projekte wie Ausstellungen oder Forschungsarbeiten vorgestellt werden, in denen Moulagen eine Rolle spielen, sowie Literaturhinweise und Links eine weitere Beschäftigung mit Moulagen anregen.

Sollten Sie eine Aufnahme ihrer Moulagensammlung in dieses Portal anstreben, füllen Sie bitte den Fragebogen aus und senden ihn via E-mail zurück. Herzlichen Dank für Ihre Mühe!

You can visit the www.moulagen.de website by clicking here. Photo is from one of my favorite moulage museums in the world, the incredible Musée des moulages de l'hôpital Saint-Louis of Paris, taken on my first visit to the museum earlier this year. Click here to visit the museum website.

Introducing Crappytaxidermy.com

My friend Kelli just alerted me to a new, great, and somewhat misleadingly named website: Crappytaxidermy.com. Ostensibly a collection of crappy taxidermy, the website is much more than that and far better and broader than the name suggests; it is in fact a kind of visual collection of the many ways in which mankind's unending pleasure in preserving, depicting, and re-creating animals including taxidermy (crappy and otherwise), models, museum dioramas, and creative taxidermy is expressed. Endless fun to peruse, though--sadly--and my only complaint--no credits to find out photographer or artifact information.

Click here to visit Crappytaxidermy.com.

Thanks so much, Kelli, for sending this along.

"Day and Night" Peepshow Views, 18th Century

Above are a few exquisite images of 18th Century "Day and Night" illuminated Peepshow Views from one my favorite websites of all time, "Early Visual Media," which is described by its author Thomas Weynants as a "Historical RAREE-SHOW to Early Vintage Visual Media." You can see the full collection, and find out more about them, by clicking here. You can check out the rest of Weynants' wonderful website by clicking here.

"Medicine Cabinet of Curiosities," Fortean Times "Dead & Buried?" Issue

Friend of Morbid Anatomy Ky Olsen has just sent me a wonderful link: it seems the Fortean Times (in this month's "Dead & Buried?" issue!) has published a story about "Blythe House"--the storehouse that holds artifacts of the Henry Wellcome collection not currently on display at either the Science Museum or the Wellcome Collection. Called "Medical Cabinet of Curiosities," the piece is a sort of lyrical ode to the overstuffed storehouse, also memorably paid homage to by The Brothers Quay in their short film "The Phantom Museum." I only wish there were more photographs of the backrooms to accompany the piece, but alas. Words will have to do.

Here are some of those words, from the article (with the original links intact):

Most of the medical history objects crammed into Blythe House’s cupboards and jostling for space on its shelves come from the collection of the pharmacist and philanthropist Henry Wellcome (1853-1936), and the air of barely contained chaos seems somehow to bear the echo of his exuberant, omnivorous delight in things. In the surgery room, lines of near-identical scalpels and tonsil guillotines are marshalled in drawerfuls of menace; nestling nearby are materials and skull fragments used in experiments by an English doctor interested in Neolithic trepenation; German WWI cotton wool is bundled in corners; surgeons’ ornate walking sticks hang over high shelves, lasting testimony to the status anxiety of their owners. Locked up in the drugs room are the antidote cases and medicine chests sent by the publicity-savvy and lionizing Wellcome on famous adventurers’ expeditions to Everest or Brazil or the Antarctic, and thousands of jars of exotically strange natural medicines collected from around the world and inscribed with apothecary-evoking legends like ‘East Indian Blistering Fly’ or ‘Dragon’s Blood’. The room of x-ray machines crosses an eccentric inventor’s workshop with a torture chamber, and contains oddities like the Pedoscope, left-over from the days when irradiation seemed a fun way to fit shoes, and early MRI brain scan equipment disguised as Jedi helmets so as not to scare the children...

Click here to read the whole article--well worth checking out! Click here to see David Pescovitz's post on Boing Boing about the article. Visit the Science Museum's infinitely browsable "Brought To Life" website, which makes this entire collection available via beautiful photos and accessible information (and from which the above image is drawn), by clicking here. For more about the Science Museum and the Wellcome Collection, see a recent Morbid Anatomy post by clicking here.

Image: Set of 60 miniature heads used in phrenology, Manchester, 1831
The heads were made by William Bally who studied phrenology under Spurzheim from 1828 onwards. The heads may have been used to teach phrenology but were probably made as a general reference collection. A wide range of different heads are present. For instance head number 54 is that of a scientific man, and head number 8 is recorded as the head of an ‘idiot.’ © The Science Museum

"Brought to Life" Project Brought to Life!

There are so many arresting wonders to be found on the Science Museum of London's newly launched (as of today!) web exhibit "Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine" that I hardly know where to begin (and don't want to tear myself away for too long to write this post.) Suffice it to say, this easy-to-navigate, attractive, crammed-with-amazing-images website could easily occupy you for hours, if not weeks. Each of the 2,500 objects is interpreted with thorough-yet-concise text entries, and a handy feature suggests like-spirited images. You can peruse by material or technology, chronology, people, or theme or use the search function if you are seeking a particular kind of object.

Above are just a very few of my hasty-first-perusal favorites. Many more to come (I have just barely begun to explore), but I HIGHLY suggest you visit the website yourself and do some perusing of your own! But maybe not if you have anything else you need to accomplish today....

Click here to visit the "Brought to Life" website. Click here (1, 2) for recent posts on the same topic. For more on the fascinating Henry Wellcome and his collection (which is featured in "Brought to Life"), see this recent post.

All images © The Science Museum; Click on images to see larger versions.