...In the 1840s there was a steady flow of foreign tourists and pilgrims to the idyllic valleys of [South Tyrol] ... solely to visit two women who were said to have received spontaneously bleeding wounds (stigmata) on their hands, feet, or head like those caused to Jesus Christ when he was nailed to the cross and forced to wear the crown of thorns. One of the two women was Maria Domenica Lazzari (sometimes spelled Lazzeri), and the other was Maria von Moehrl (also called Mörl). The former was known as L'Addolorata (the woman of pain), the latter as L'Estatica (the woman of ecstasy), for reasons which will become clear.On this Good Friday -- the holiday commemorating Jesus Christ's death by crucification -- why not take a moment to consider the medio-religious condition of stigmata, ie. spontaneous bleeding (mostly found in the female persuasion) on the hands, feet, and/or head, mimicking the wounds caused to Jesus Christ when he was nailed to the cross and forced to wear the crown of thorns?
The last decade has revealed a burgeoning interest and fascination with human skin, particularly among philosophers, writers, artists and designers. Meanwhile, regenerative medicine has seen major advances in the development of artificial skin designed to improve the structure, function and appearance of the body surface that has been damaged by disease, injury or ageing. So there couldn't be a better time to get under the surface of this subject.--Lucy Shanahan, Wellcome Collection Curator and co-curator of 'Skin'I have been hearing excellent reports from scores of people about the new Wellcome Collection exhibition entitled, simply, 'Skin.' Sadly, I will not be able to see it in person (as it closes on September 2th), but the images above--most drawn from the exhibition website--and the web exhibition text make it clear that the Wellcome has done it again: a thoughtful, broadly considered, and lovely investigation and survey into the science, meaning, art, and implications of the notion of 'skin.'
The skin is our largest organ. It gives us a vital protective layer, is crucial for our sense of touch and provides us with a highly sensitive and visible interface between our inner body and the outside world. Spots, scars, moles, wrinkles, tans and tattoos: the look of skin can reveal much about an individual's lifestyle, health, age and personality, as well as their cultural and religious background. The skin is also remarkable for its ability to regenerate and repair itself.For more about the exhibition including hours and visiting information, visit the Wellcome Collection website by clicking here. You can visit the image galleries--from which most of the above images were pulled and which contain many more riches--by clicking here.; Credits and captions for images follow. Also, if you are, like me, a fan of the Wellcome and its work, you won't want to miss tonight's lecture at Observatory featuring Wellcome Collection curator Kate Forde; click here for more on that.
The multidisciplinary exhibition 'Skin' takes a predominantly historical approach, beginning with early anatomical thought in the 16th and 17th centuries, when, for anatomists, the skin was simply something to be removed and discarded in order to study the internal organs. The story continues through the 18th and 19th centuries and approaches its conclusion in the 20th century, by which time the skin was considered to be of much greater significance and studied as an organ in its own right.
The exhibition will incorporate early medical drawings, 19th-century paintings, anatomical models and cultural artefacts juxtaposed with sculpture, photography and film works by artists including Damien Hirst, Helen Chadwick and Wim Delvoye.
The 'Skin' exhibition will be complemented by the 'Skin Lab', which features artistic responses to developments in plastic surgery, scar treatments and synthetic skin technologies, including two newly commissioned works by the artists Rhian Solomon and Gemma Anderson. Visitors are invited to participate in an interactive and sensory experience - experimenting with skin-flap models used in plastic surgery, trying on latex skin-suits or studying biological jewelery.
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.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.
Object number: 1988-249
Head of Discovery and EngagementYou can find out more by clicking here. To find out more about the astounding Wellcome Library, click here.
Wellcome Library
Closing Date: 5/10/2010
Salary: £50 000 - £60 000
Job Details
The Wellcome Trust is a global charity dedicated to achieving extraordinary improvements in human and animal health. We support the brightest minds in biomedical research and the medical humanities.
The Wellcome Library is the one of the world's great cultural treasures: a unique and irreplaceable collection, which documents medicine and its role in society, past and present. As Head of Discovery and Engagement, you will play a pivotal role in making these outstanding collections accessible, a key part of an ambitious strategy to transform the Wellcome Library. This will include revolutionising our web presence and reading-room services to meet the needs of existing and new audiences and developing the Library's role as not only a world-class research resource, but also as part of Wellcome Collection, one of London's most exciting cultural destinations.
A passionate advocate for our collections, you will lead the Library's outreach, communication and marketing activities and, by developing our understanding of users and their needs, ensure we have a robust framework for evaluating our success. As a key member of the senior management team, reporting to the Head of Library, you will need to demonstrate: significant experience in a public/user focused role in a cultural environment; a commitment to audience development and engagement programmes; a proven understanding of commissioning audience research and evaluation; a good knowledge of social media and web technologies and experience of creating/commissioning web content; previous staff management experience and an ability to manage budgets/resources; excellent written and verbal communication skills across a broad range of stakeholders; a demonstrable ability to contribute creatively and enthusiastically at a strategic level. In addition a strong interest in the history of health, medicine or science would be advantageous.
For more information on the Wellcome Library and the transformation strategy, please visit: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk For more information on this role or a job description and to apply online visit: www.wellcome.ac.uk/jobs Alternatively write to: HR, Wellcome Trust, 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE. Please send a CV (including salary details) and covering letter explaining how you meet the criteria and what you feel you can bring to this role.
A science museum is a kind of experiment. It demands the most elaborate equipment: Imax theaters, NASA space vehicles, collections of living creatures, digital planetarium projectors, fossilized bones. Into this mix are thrust tens of thousands of living human beings: children on holiday, weary or eager parents, devoted teachers, passionate aficionados and casual passers-by. And the experimenters watch, test, change, hoping. ...You can read the full article--which I really recommend!--by clicking here. I love that the reviewer was as happily intrigued by the Wellcome Collection as I; more on that wonderful institution (perhaps my favorite medical museum--if you can call it that--in the world!) here, here, here, here and here. Click on image to see much larger version.
Hoping for what? What are the goals of these experiments, and when do they succeed? Whenever I’m near one of these museological laboratories, I eagerly submit to their probes, trying to find out. The results can be discouraging since some experiments seem so purposeless; their only goal might be to see if subjects can be persuaded to return for future amusement..... The experimentation may be a sign of the science museum’s struggle to define itself.
A century ago, such a notion would have been ridiculous. Museums were simply collections of objects. And science museums were collections of objects related to scientific inquiry and natural exploration. Their collections grew out of the “wonder cabinets” of gentlemen explorers, conglomerations of the marvelous.
Museums ordered their objects to reflect a larger natural order. In 1853, when a new natural history museum at Oxford University was being proposed, one advocate suggested that each specimen should have “precisely the same relative place that it did in God’s own Museum, the Physical Universe in which it lived and moved and had its being.” The science museum was meant to impress the visitor with the intricate order of the universe, the abilities of science to discern that order, and the powers of a culture able to present it all in so imposing a secular temple.
Not all of this was disinterested. Natural history museums typically treated non-Western cultures as if they were subsidiary branches in an evolutionary narrative; deemed closer to nature, these cultures were treated as part of natural history rather than as part of history. Self-aggrandizing posing was generally mixed in with the museum project.
But you can still feel its energy. Go to any science museum with an extensive collection and walk among its oldest display cases. The London Science Museum, for example, which had its origins in the Crystal Palace of the Great Exposition of 1851, has collections that still invoke the churning energies of the Industrial Revolution and its transformations.
One of the most astonishing collections I have seen is the Wellcome Collection, also in London. It includes moccasins owned by Florence Nightingale, Napoleon’s toothbrush, amputation saws, an array of prosthetic limbs, a Portuguese executioner’s mask, Etruscan votive offerings and obstetrical forceps. Henry Wellcome, who had made his fortune with the invention of the medicinal pill, owned over a million objects by the mid-1930s and imagined them fitting into a great “Museum of Man” that would encyclopedically trace humanity’s concerns with the body. After his death, the collection was partly dispersed, but even what is left is as exhilarating as it is bewildering. You look at such collections and sense an enormous exploratory enterprise. You end up with an enlarged understanding of the world’s variety and an equally enlarged sense of the human capacity to make sense of it.
But that ambition is gone and so is the trust in ourselves. This may be the crux of the uncertainty in contemporary science museums. Where does the museum place us, its human creators? ...
...in addition there were two special exhibits. The renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) brought over from Paris a life-size wax model of a recumbent woman with locomotor ataxy and disordered joints, together with her preserved skeleton, illustrating one of Charcot's many clinical discoveries; and Jonathan Hutchinson, the chairman of the Museum Committee, organized an "Exhibition of Living Patients"...Morbid Anatomy reader Alexis Kinloch just this morning sent me an article that, synchronicitously (is that a word?), featured a photograph of the very wax model described in today's earlier Morbid Anatomy post "The Exhibition of Living Patients, 1881 London, England," as detailed in the above epigraph excerpted from that post.
The organizers of the Congress decided to include among the attractions a museum in which specimens of one sort or another could be shown. These were mainly drawings, photographs and casts, but in addition there were two special exhibits. The renowned neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot (1825-1893) brought over from Paris a life-size wax model of a recumbent woman with locomotor ataxy and disordered joints, together with her preserved skeleton, illustrating one of Charcot's many clinical discoveries; and Jonathan Hutchinson, the chairman of the Museum Committee, organized an "Exhibition of Living Patients".You can read the entire post, and find out much more, by clicking here. You can find out more about the utterly amazing Wellcome Library--which I spent many happy hours in during my last visit to London--by clicking here. All images are sourced from the original post, and are, in the words of the post, "believed to be strays from Jonathan Hutchinson's 'Clinical Museum', though their connection with Hutchinson is at present only circumstantial;" Captions read: Paintings commissioned by Sir Jonathan Hutchinson, ca. 1891-1906. no. 18.; Top image: "A man with Lupus erythematosus. Watercolour by Mabel Green, 1902." Bottom image: The shin of a boy with a rash; rolled trouser-leg and sock in place. Watercolour by Mabel Green, 1896.
The Exhibition of Living Patients was something of an experiment, and it turned out to be a victim of its own success. It was allotted one of two rooms (the museum room and the boardroom) of the Geological Society, one of the Learned Societies which have been housed since 1874 in magnificent buildings around the courtyard of Burlington House on Piccadilly.
According to Hutchinson there was "confusion and crowding … Our exhibition was more popular than we had expected: every morning at the hour announced, the room filled. The weather chanced to be very hot [this was the first week of August], and as the room looked into Piccadilly, it was exceedingly noisy." One of the reasons for the noise was that, while the hubbub of Piccadilly entered through the open windows, not only did the doctors presenting their patients have to speak over it but at the same time visitors were continually jostling in and out of the crowded room. [1]
For those who could get near it, the exhibition was evidently quite a sight. Beneath the chandeliers in the fine rooms sat seven patients with leprosy, four of them supplied by Hutchinson. Six patients with diseases designated as myxoedema sat in a row and "the peculiarities of their features, and the sameness in their peculiarities, became very conspicuous"...
Cooper's painting [see top image] was part of a series commissioned by the pharmaceutical entrepreneur Henry Wellcome for his museum of medical history, which opened in 1913. Like other objects there, it was a mixture of the real and the fake. "Part science, part obsession, part research, part entertainment, part benefaction, part self-promotion: Wellcome's great Historical Medical Museum was always more of a fantasy than a reality," writes Frances Larson in An Infinity of Things.Read the entire review (and check out photo-gallery, from which above images are drawn) by clicking here. To pre-order the book from Amazon, click here.
Wellcome was born in a Wisconsin log cabin in 1853. By the time he died in 1936, grudgingly admired but unloved, he was a millionaire, knight, and the owner of a grotesquely overwhelming collection of objects from around the globe. Largely uncatalogued in various warehouses in London, virtually none of it was exhibited, despite his dream of building a "complete" museum on the history of illness and health. Today, it is mostly dispersed through the UK's museums, with a selection on elegant display at the Wellcome Collection in London.
Accurately billed not as a biography but as "the biography of a collection", the book is penetratingly honest. In places it reads as a gripping story of a bit of a monster, but Larson is too much the fastidious scholar - and too little the imaginative writer - to sensationalise the material. So the story is muted, along with the iniquity. She notes Wellcome's "boundless curiosity", which is evident in his collection, but what she documents is his boundless and ruthless acquisitiveness. One chapter is titled "The whole of India should be ransacked" - a quote from Wellcome's instructions to his collector in India. By the end, one feels rather sickened at the futility of his avarice.
[Anatomical Fugitive Sheets] depict the human body through labelled illustrations, often using a three-dimensional 'pop-up' device of superimposed flaps, which can be raised in sequence to display the internal anatomy of the male or female figure. The fugitive sheet thus mimics the act of dissection. They were a popular instructional aid in the 16th century and many were produced in vernacular languages which could be read by a lay audience interested in the workings of the human body.To read the full original post and learn more about anatomical fugitive sheets, click here. You can watch the videos by clicking here. You can view the still images by clicking here and typing in "anatomical fugitive sheet."
Medicine Show: Putting Science and Health on DisplayI will definitely be making a pilgrimage of my own from Brooklyn to see the lecture; hope to see you there!
Wellcome Collection opened its doors to the public just over 18 months ago. Since then it has welcomed close to 500,000 visits and has received lavish plaudits from all corners of the UK’s press and media, as well as internationally. It presents an uncompromisingly brainy approach to putting medicine on public display, but within a broad cultural context that seems to appeal to a wide grown-up audience.
In this talk, Dr Ken Arnold outlines the Wellcome’s inquisitive curatorial approach to exploring medical science (past and present) within the broad context of the whole human condition. He discusses the permanent display of Henry Wellcome’s museum collection Medicine Man, and a recent temporary exhibition Skeletons: London’s Buried Bones, one of seven shows to have been mounted since June 2007. Dr Arnold will argue that while the work of the Wellcome represents a refreshing and innovative approach to engaging the public with medicine and its history, the approach owes much to the incurably curious instincts that led to the setting up of Europe’s first museums in the Renaissance. His conclusion is that there is something timelessly full of wonder about putting medicine on show.
." For the short, which accompanied the Medicine Man exhibition at the British Museum (and plays on an infinite loop in the Wellcome Collection's "Medicine Man" gallery), The Brothers take us on an evocative tour of an imaginary Wellcome archive, peopled with mysteriously animated prosthetics, coupling erotic figurines, and swooning anatomical mannequins. Lovely stuff, and a great introduction to the vast wonder that is the collection of Henry Wellcome, even in its current diminished incarnation. (Note: if you live in the NYC area, feel free to stop by the Morbid Anatomy Library for a complementary viewing.)
