New York Academy of Medicine All-Day "Wonder Cabinet and Medical History Festival" Curated by Lawrence Weschler and Morbid Anatomy, Saturday, October 5, NYC

Did you know that there is a world-class medical library in New York City? And that it is located in a gorgeous historical building (see above)? And that its open to the public to boot? No? Well, don't feel too bad. Neither, it seems, do many people, beyond the dedicated readers--from scholars to artists--who make use of its resources. 

Please allow me, then, to introduce you to the very lovely and highly wonderful New York Academy of Medicine (NYAM). Founded in 1847 and located in Manhattan at Fifth Avenue and 103rd Street, this library--which I have had the happy opportunity to excavate at length--houses and makes available to the public a wide variety of historical treasures and curiosities.

My good friend Lisa O'Sullivan--formerly senior medical curator at The Science Museum in London--is the director of NYAM's Center for the History of Medicine and Public Health, which she is keen to develop into a space to nurture people operating at the intersections of medicine and the humanities. I am sure we can all agree, her conception will provide a welcome addition to the New York scene!

Lisa has invited Morbid Anatomy to explore and blog about NYAM's wonderful rare and historical materials here and on the Center's own Books, Health and History blog. She has also invited Morbid Anatomy to co-curate--along with Lawrence Weschler, former director of NYU Institute for the Humanities/Wonder Cabinet series and author of the amazing Mr. Wilson and his Cabinet of Wonders--a day of public programming for an open house which will place in just over a month, on Saturday, October 5.

This all day, open-to-the-public, mostly free (!) "Wonder Cabinet and Medical History Festival" will include lectures, workshops, demonstrations and, at the end of the day, a party featuring medical films from the National Library of Medicine, the music of DJ Friese Undine, and an open bar. Speakers and participants will include neurologist and author Oliver Sacks along with such Morbid Anatomy regulars as cultural critic Mark Dery, Portraits of the Mind author Carl Schoonover, the National Library of Medicine's Michael Sappol, media historian Amy Herzog, historian Daniel Margocsy, medical illustrator Marie Dauenheimer and Cranioklepty author Colin Dickey.

A series of 20-minute mini-lectures will explore such varied topics as 18th century wax anatomical models; "Anthropodermic bibliopegy," or books bound in human skin; Charles Wilson Peale and the first American museum (by an authentic Peale descendent!); Ruysch, Descartes and the Problem of Wax; Cranioklepty, or the thefts of famous skulls; An iconography of rays, beams, and waves in medical drawings from 1920-1960; death and the diorama; "Terror management theory"; and neuroscience from antiquity to Cajal.

Reprises of some of our most popular Morbid Anatomy Art Academy workshops will give you the opportunity to craft your own Hans Holbein-inspired Dance of Death linoleum cut; dissect and draw with real anatomical specimens; learn the principles of comparative anatomy with the aid of animal skeletons; and learn the antiquated carbon dust method of medical illustration.

Visitors will also have to chance to take in a medical wax moulage demonstration by wax artist Sigrid Sarda, an "anatomy performance" in which artist Kriota Willberg demonstrates the musculoskeletal system on a live model, and the crafting of a memento mori-themed linoleum cut. They will also have the chance to explore the fantastic inner spaces of this incredible and under-seen New York landmark.

You can find out more about the event by clicking here; stay tuned for more about both the event and the rich holdings of the NYAM in these weeks leading up to the event.

This is sure to be an amazing event; I hope very much to see you there!

"Le Livre de Sante," Joseph Handler, 1967 (Volume 6)

All images from Joseph Handler's Le Livre de Sante (Monte Carlo: Andre Sauret, 1967)
volume 6: "La bouche et les dents. Le systeme digestif. Les reins" and found on the wonderful blog Journey Around my Skull. You can visit the full post--with additional images--by clicking here.

Images top to bottom:

1. Dents temporaires et germes des dents permanentes, illus. Pasqualini
2. Les levres, illus. Aslan
3. Constitution du rein, illus. W. Hess

"L'anatomie du corps humain: Avec ses maladies, & les remedes pour les guerir," Saint-Hilaire, 1684

You can browse the whole book by clicking here.

Harvey Cushing (1869-1939)

More here. Via Elettrogenica.

Antique "Cuppers and Leeches" Business Card, 19th C?

Click on image to see larger version. Via The Mouth and the Knife.

"Medical Oddities, Nature's Anomalies and Carnival Gaffs: A Pop Up Book for Children"

Found in Crowolf's Flick-stream; Click here to see more. Click on image to see larger version.

Modern Medical Marvel: Fir Grows in Mans Lung, 2009, Ural Mountains

In a story that brings to mind early medical hoaxes such as Mary Tofts' miraculous, doctor-verified birthing of a litter of rabbits in 1726, doctors in the Ural Mountains claim to have recently opened up the chest of a man suspected of having lung cancer and finding... a small fir tree.

From the article in the Gaurdian:

The annals of medical anomalies bulge with stories from far-flung places where the idea of a reliable source is a chap sitting on a gate in a goatskin fleece who waves to passersby, even if there are none. And so to the Urals, where medics are reported to have removed a tiny fir tree from a man's lung, after he complained of chest pains. Before doctors opened him up, they were convinced he had lung cancer. Now, they're convinced he inhaled a seed, which sprouted inside him.

Surgeon Vladimir Kamashev at Izhevsk hospital was about to remove a large part of 28-year-old Artyom Sidorkin's lung, when he took a closer look, according to reports. He was stunned to see a 5cm-long spruce inside, the Russian news agency Pravda says.

A spokeswoman for the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, London, is flummoxed. "A seed might be able to germinate in the damp, dark conditions of a lung, but it's still bizarre," she says.

The gruesome photo [see bottom image] released with the story claims to show the spruce jutting from a clump of Sidorkin's lung tissue. The plant looks firm and healthy, with bright green needles. It's as if it had been grown in the best soil with plenty of sunlight. It lacks roots in the way fresh clippings do.

Lungs are good at getting rid of unexpected visitors. They are lined with mucus that traps everything from mould spores to flies. This is pushed out of the lungs by tiny hairs called cilia. You end up coughing it out, or swallowing it.

"The closest I've heard to this are balls of mould that grow in patients who have abnormalities in their lungs," says Simon Johnson, a reader in respiratory medicine at Nottingham University. "They can get up to a few centimetres, but you would know because you would be coughing up blood."

Both images are drawn from the Geekologie post "Gross!: Man Grows Small Fir Tree In Lung;" click here to see that post. Read the full Gaurdian story by clicking here. To find out more about Mary Tofts, click here. You can watch a short, unintentionally surrealistic video on the story (after waiting through an annoying commercial) by clicking here.

Thanks to John Troyer, Death and Dying Practices Associate, Centre for Death and Society at the University of Bath) for bringing this story to my attention!

"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.

More from The Science Museum of London's "Brought to Life" Website

More (see recent post!) artifacts to be featured on the Science Museum of London's "Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine" website, due to launch in just days! (March 2nd, to be exact).

So, what do we have here? From the item description:

Set of nine wax plaques showing foetal development and dissection views of a female figure, Europe, 1801-1830

This series of nine wax plaques shows both the development of a foetus during pregnancy and anatomical details from the dissection of a young female figure who is pregnant in a number of the images.

Top to bottom: Female figure, deep dissection to show kidneys, uterus, etc.; Female figure, part of skin and wall of uterus removed showing foetus in utero; Foetus in placenta in utero.

For more on the "Brought to Life" project--with pictures!--click here. For more on the Science Museum's astounding history of medicine collection, click here. To count down the days until the website launches, visit the official website here.

All images © The Science Museum

Science Museum, London "Brought To Life" Website

The Science Museum of London is launching an ambitious and amazing sounding website this March entitled Brought to Life: Exploring the History of Medicine. The website will present images of, and details about, 2,500 fantastic objects illustrating centuries of medical history from around the world. Many of these objects have never been on public view; others are on display in the (wonderful) health and medicine galleries of the museum. The project is supported by the Wellcome Trust, and the website will feature access to items from the Wellcome Trust collection held by the Science Museum.

The intriguing images above--sent to me very kindly by Lisa O'Sullivan, Senior Medical Curator of The Science Museum--are just a very few that will be included on the new website. I will feature more in days to come!

Object details, from top to bottom:
1) A70549 Wooden snuff box, France 1801-1830
Snuffbox with three views of a phrenological skull. There is a key on the base of the box. For example number 6 equals the ability to see colour and number 24, good-naturedness.

2) A642804 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.’

3) A645154 Ivory and horn model of an eye, Europe, 1601-1700
The model unscrews to show the different parts of the eye including the cornea, , the pupil, the iris, the jelly-like vitreous humour that fills most of the eyeball and the optic nerve that transmits messages to the brain.

All images © The Science Museum

Dino Valls, 21st Century

Found via the VFR Chick Livejournal. To see much more of this Madrid based artist's work, visit the artist's website.

Dibner Hall of Science, The Huntington Library

On November 1st, a new permanent exhibition opened at the Huntington Library. Called " ‘Beautiful Science: Ideas that Changed the World," the exhibition showcases highlights from the Burndy Library, one of the world's largest libraries of books on the history of science and technology, which was recently donated to the Huntington by the Dibner family. The foci of the exhibition are astronomy, natural history, medicine, and light.

Daniel Lewis, the curator of the exhibition, explains “we want people to think about the beauty of science in a historical context—the elegant breakthroughs, the remarkable discoveries, and the amazing people and stories behind them.”

For more information, visit the Huntington's website here. For a review of the new hall, see Ars Technica. For more on the Burndy Library, see this wikipedia entry. Found via SGV Tribune.

First image: SGV Tribune Caption reads "Dan Lewis, Dibner Senior Curator of the History of Science & Technology at The Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens in San Marino. Thursday October 16, 2008." Staff Photo by Walt Mancini
Second image: From the Los Angeles Times. Photo by Mark Boster
Third image: The spine. From William Cheselden, Osteographia, or the Anatomy of the Bones, London, 1733
Fourth image: The “flayed angel.” From Gautier D'Agoty and Joseph Guichard Duverny, Myologie complete (Comprehensive Study of the Muscles), Paris, 1746.
Fifth image: Twins. From George Spratt, Obstetric Tables, London, 1841.

"Images of the Human Body," Pepin Press

All of the above images are drawn from the CD-ROM of anatomical images (with lovely illustrated book/catalog) I just picked up at the Wellcome Collection bookstore called Images of the Human Body. The collection contains 295 illustrations of a variety of views of the anatomical body in both hi-and low-resolution formats and it is published by Pepin Press.

These are just a very few of my favorite images in the collection; I have posted more of my favorites here. You can find out more about the book here.

Stethonet Website

I just discovered the Stethonet Website via the blog La Rubrique Necro. The site contains a number of fascinating images, including those shown above--French pharmaceutical advertisements from 1942 and surgical photographs with nuns lurking in the backgound. Visit the website (perhaps with the assistance of Google's "translate this page" feature) to see and read more.

"Culpeper's English Physician and Complete Herbal," C. 1790

The wonderful illustrations in this book, which has been completely scanned and posted online, was brought to my attention by a "Friend of Morbid Anatomy" who would like to remain annonymous.

Full description reads: Culpeper's English physician and complete herbal : to which are now first added upwards of one hundred additional herbs, with a display of their medicinal and occult properties physically applied to the cure of all disorders incident to mankind, to which are annexed rules for compounding medicine according to the true system of nature, forming a complete family dispensatory and natural system of physic ... / illustrated with notes and observations, critical and explanatory by E. Sibley ..., London : printed for the proprietors and sold by C. Stalker ..., 1790.

Peruse the whole book (and learn more about it) here.