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Cultures of anatomical collections
A few weeks ago, I attended the conference “Cultures of Anatomical Collections” in Leiden, the Netherlands. I’m still thinking about and absorbing all the things I learned there. It was the kind of...
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Playing Chicken
photo by Gavin Schaefer Back in 2012, the US Department of Agriculture proposed new regulations for processing chickens. These included speeding up the processing line from 140 birds a minute to 175...
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Why fierce animals are fierce
The eighteenth-century Dutch physician Herman Boerhaave (1668-1738) wrote many books, but among his most famous were his Aphorisms and his Materia medica, both of which were translated and reprinted...
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Sir Nicholas Gimcrack rides again
In today’s New York Times there is a report on some new experiments on rejuvenation. Blood from young mice, it appears, can reverse signs of aging in old mice. The article cites experiments in the...
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A Sonnet to an Anatomist
Montpellier surgeon Barthélémy Cabrol (1529-1603) first published his Alphabet anatomic in 1594. A series of tables that graphically represented the parts of the body, it was immensely popular, with...
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An Eighteenth-Century Sweeney Todd
Skeleton, after Vesalius, 1670, Wellcome Images 2 January 2015 A human skeleton was an essential ornament to the early modern dissecting room. Beginning with Vesalius, a number of anatomical textbooks...
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Coming in May … my long-awaited book, The Courtiers’ Anatomists!
jacket image for The Courtiers’ Anatomists To appear from the University of Chicago Press on May 20. See the Chicago website or Amazon. Book launch party at OSU on May 21. More soon!
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The Skeleton Trade: Life, Death, and Commerce in Early Modern Europe
Originally posted on Objects in Motion: Material Culture in Transition: Anita Guerrini, Horning Professor of the Humanities and Professor of History at Oregon State University, discusses the...
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Mapping histories of medicine
nicky553:A great post by my friend, the Dutch historian of science Marieke Hendriksen, on employing digital humanities techniques. Originally posted on The Medicine Chest: Over the past few months, I...
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On Slate’s The Vault blog: The Moving Skeleton
British Library http://www.slate.com/content/slate/blogs/the_vault/2015/10/30/history_of_automated_skeletons_as_entertainment.html
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The Secret Horror of Dissection
The eighteenth-century anatomist William Hunter (1718-1783) told his students that the practice of dissection “familiarizes the heart to a kind of necessary inhumanity.”(1) A few decades earlier,...
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Vesalius and the beheaded man
On the 12th of May, 1543, Jakob Karrer von Getweiler was executed in Basel, Switzerland. Reports say he was beheaded, although hanging was a more usual mode of execution. Karrer was a bigamist who...
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The Corpse Walk: Paris, 1660
[This is excerpted from the talk I gave at the New York Academy of Medicine on 13 September 2016, which was itself excerpted from my book The Courtiers’ Anatomists] Under cover of night, the dead of...
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Vesalius in Wonderland
Last month, artist Lisa Temple-Cox had a residency at Oregon State for two weeks as part of the Horning Series on “The Material Body” that I organized this academic year. Among the numerous talks and...
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The Gruesome History of Making Human Skeletons
The fabulous online journal Atlas Obscura just published an article on some of my skeleton research. This is based on the talk, “The Whiteness of Bones,” that I gave a Columbia a couple of weeks ago....
View ArticleA Sonnet to an Anatomist
Montpellier surgeon Barthélémy Cabrol (1529-1603) first published his Alphabet anatomic in 1594. A series of tables that graphically represented the parts of the body, it was immensely popular, with...
View ArticleAn Anatomy Cabinet
Utrecht, Netherlands, July 2019 Among the many delights for a historian of medicine like me at the University Museum in Utrecht is a reconstructed anatomy cabinet from the late eighteenth century. It...
View ArticleThe Head of a Roman
For the past few weeks, many news outlets have reported that the skull of Pliny the Elder (Gaius Plinius Secundus, ca. 23-79 CE), the Roman naturalist and statesman who died at Pompeii, has been...
View ArticleThe Dance of Death and the first printed skeleton
The earliest printed image of a human skeleton is this cartoonish image from a German block book from the 1450s. [i] It is one of a series of skeletons in the popular genre known as the danse macabre...
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