There is something primally captivating about the successful reproduction of life in art or technology. The Bowes Silver Swan is a wonderful example, dating back to the 18th century. To the accompaniment of a tinkling music box, the life-size swan moves its head, preens, and appears to catch a silver fish (which is really concealed in its throat) out of the glass “stream” it rests in.
This YouTube video captures the swan in surprisingly good resolution, but even better, it captures the genuine childlike enthusiasm of the rapt museum-goers watching the swan’s performance. Apparently we haven’t been totally jaded by CGI - not yet, at least!
John Bowes bought the Swan for 200 pounds in 1872; the Swan is first recorded in an account from 1773, and was made by, I kid you not, someone named John Joseph Merlin. Normally, the Swan performs once or twice daily at the Bowes Museum, but on Friday, Jan. 25, 2008 it will be taken off display for an expert analysis of its three clockwork mechanisms. It is expected to return to catching fish the following day.
Ironically, real swans eat insects, tadpoles, and vegetation, but not fish, so far as I know.
As I file away the debris of the last year, I realize that I never finished posting about my week in London this summer. It was exhausting, but by no means exhaustive. I feel foolish that I didn’t plan ahead! But I did hit the major highlights: on Sunday I saw the Chelsea Physic Garden with Neurophilosphy’s Moheb. On Tuesday I visited the shiny new Wellcome Collection, right around the corner from University College London. Thursday was Sir John Soane’s Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum, and the Natural History Museum. On Friday I dropped by the Royal College of Surgeons, which houses both the Hunterian Museumand the Wellcome Museum of Anatomy and Pathology. (Wellcome’s name is all over the place, because it’s the UK’s largest independent charitable trust funding medical research. I can’t quite determine if they’re richer than HHMI. . . isn’t that the non-profit equivalent of “richer than Croesus”?) I’ve already posted about the Hunterian Museum & Wellcome Museum. Today I want to add some notes about a few other destinations.
Wellcome Collection
The Wellcome collection has thee exhibit galleries - a changing exhibition downstairs, and two upstairs galleries which feature artifacts from Wellcome’s personal collection and contemporary science-influenced art. The current exhibition is “Sleeping and Dreaming,” but during my visit it was “The Heart,” interleaving medical illustrations and models of great historical significance (art/texts by da Vinci, Harvey, and Galen; varnished wood anatomical tables; a wax model of a dissected, Venus-like torso; etc.) with popular portrayals of the heart as seat of love & soul. Here’s the exhibition summary:
The heart, widely understood as the place where life begins and ends, has always featured as a potent symbol in our religions, myths and rituals. Modern medical science has taught us that much of the power and influence traditionally attributed to the heart actually lies in the brain. Nevertheless we remain reluctant to let go of the notion - deeply rooted in everyday language and imagery - that the heart is the home of our emotions and of our true character.
This exhibition looked at the evolution of our understanding of what the heart is, what it does and what it means. Concentrating primarily on Western medicine and culture, it brought together objects and images from the histories of both science and art, as well as from everyday life.
It followed the development of our anatomical knowledge of the heart, but also considered its far-reaching cultural and symbolic significance. Why is it that the pump that circulates our blood is so intimately bound up with the way we discuss our emotional and moral lives, and so central to the question of the relationship between body and soul?
It’s an interesting question, and the answer is by no means obvious. Now that everyone knows the brain is where “love” resides, why do we still return to the heart as the symbol of deep emotion? The brain isn’t very romantic in appearance, but neither is the heart - it’s actually quite a gruesome and unattractive organ, wrapped in a nasty tough membranous sac and swaddled in fat (it’s really horrifying how much fat is packed around the hearts of even individuals of normal weight). The exhibit successfully explored that contradiction, without ever getting too esoteric. While you can no longer see it in person, and unfortunately photography was not allowed, you can view selected images on line here.
Other feature of the Wellcome collection included a selection of biomedicine-inspired art, including giant wax insect models (vectors that transmit malaria), glass models of viroids, and provocative pieces like John Isaacs’ “I can’t help the way I feel” (below). These were intermixed with the educational - a bound set of volumes representing the human genome, interactive computer games - and, in the next room over, the voyeuristically bizarre - chastity belts, vintage fetishes, and prosthetic limbs from Sir Henry Wellcome’s personal collection. Something for everyone!
Wax models of malaria vectors
Wellcome Collection
I can’t help the way I feel (2003)
John Isaacs “In this work lies an interest in a possibility of the emotional landscape of the body becoming manifest in its surface. Visually, the way in which the flesh grows, erupts, and engulfs the body can be seen as a metaphor of the way in which we become incapacitated by the emotional landscape in which we live and over which we have little control. The body also appears to be suffering from some kind of malignancy, as in cancer, but for me, the image of the figure, coupled with the title, leads one into an open contemplation of the plight of the individual.” - John Isaacs
HIV Virus Sculpture (2004)
Luke Jerram “This sculpture was created in response to the constant bombardment by coloured images we receive through the media. Many of these images are designed to communicate fear. The artificial coloring of images also affects what we think a virus looks like.” - Luke Jerram
Additional destinations
Unfortunately, squeezing even half of London’s museums into a week-long visit is impossible. And if you’re a devotee of biological specimens and medical history, the places you’d like to see are probably not in your guidebook, because most people think they’re “icky.” So here are a few insights I gained on my trip and would like to share.
First, be aware that many museums are closed Mondays. Most are open only between 10 and 5; you might want to eschew lunch to maximize your viewing time, or eat on the run. The Tube goes almost everywhere you’ll need, so buy an Oyster card; a week’s pass for zones 1-2, which can be coded onto your Oyster card, is probably a good idea as well. But the Tube is slow, especially on weekends, so plan ahead - you don’t want to waste an hour of that precious 10-5 window in transit from Holborn to Chelsea!
Natural History Museum, London
The British Museum: Mummies, Lindow Man. Be prepared: the Egyptian exhibits are noisy and busy, especially on the weekend. Lindow man, on the other hand, is totally neglected, probably because he looks like a dried up omelet. When you become homicidal towards tour groups, seek him out in the corner of room 50.
Lindow Man: not terribly photogenic, is he?
British Library “Treasures” (Ritblat Gallery) - Harvey’s De Motu Cordis, letter from Darwin to Wallace, various herbal and medical manuscripts. Alas, no photography allowed - but go to the website, they have some lovely images there.
University College London: Pure randomness, in that collegiate what-shall-we-stick-in-our-glass-cabinets? sense. But it’s right around the corner from the Wellcome Galleries, so why not pay your respects to the Auto-Icon of Jeremy Bentham (his skeleton, dressed in his clothes, with a wax head, sitting in what appears to be an antique telephone booth). So wierd.
The Chelsea Physic Garden: Second-oldest apothecaries’ garden in England (oldest is at Oxford). Snag a tour guide for the best experience, since the map and labels don’t do much good. Then seek out the small glass cases of medical oddities in the back of the gift shop. The garden is only open in the afternoon, on certain days, so you’ll have to plan around it, but it’s extraordinarily peaceful (especially after the British Museum). And the walk through Chelsea is lovely.
Vintage drug paraphernalia? Chelsea Physic Garden
The Wellcome Library (same location as the Wellcome collection, but slightly different hours): You need to come prepared, knowing what you want to view. Research in advance! I didn’t! Damn!
I ran across this collage by the talented Nicole Natri shortly after attending an interesting lecture, “When Sleeping Beauty Walked Out of the Anatomy Museum,” by Kathryn Hoffmann, who is a professor of French at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. The connection here is pretty cool, but it’s roundabout, so bear with me.
Dr. Hoffmann’s talk was my introduction to Pierre Spitzner’s traveling museum, the “Musee Spitzner”: a collection of anatomical models, moulages, specimens, paintings, dioramas, etc., that toured Europe for about a century before being dismantled circa WW2. Some of the Spitzner pieces ended up at the University of Paris, but unfortunately many others are now lost. The Spitzner’s centerpiece was a wax anatomical model of a sleeping woman, which opened to reveal her internal organs - much like the Anatomical Venus by Susini at La Specola, but simpler in execution. Unlike Susini’s model, however, the Spitzner Venus had a mechanical movement intended to emulate breath: her chest rose and fell as she lay there in her white nightgown. That’s a dramatic dissolution of the distinction between life, sleep, and death - and with its vivisectionist overtones, quite disturbing!
As if the breathing, sleeping Venus wasn’t interesting enough in her own right, the Surrealist painter Paul Delvaux, known for depicting languid naked (or nightgowned) women wandering the streets of Paris, was heavily influenced by the Spitzner collection (as mentioned in a recent post over at Morbid Anatomy). He encountered it at the Brussels Fair in 1932. Delvaux painted the Spitzner itself several times (The Musee Spitzner, 1943, below), but I didn’t realize until Professor Hoffmann’s talk how direct the connection is.
Compare Delvaux’ Sleeping Venus (1944) to Susini’s Anatomical Venus (the Spitzner’s wax Venus did not look exactly like this, but was probably close). Then compare The Musee Spitzner (as David Scott recommends in his book, Surrealizing the Nude) to Wiertz’ La Belle Rosina (1847):
The Sleeping Venus (1944)
Paul Delvaux
Anatomical Venus
Clemente Susini
Musee Spitzner (reproduction; original destroyed; 1943)
Paul Delvaux
La Belle Rosina (1847)
Antoine Wiertz
I always thought all these skeletons and somnambulant nudes were simply Delvaux’s bizarre imagination run amok. But it appears Delvaux was just as obsessed with, and influenced by, medical curiosities as we are today. (Life and death, you know - heavy stuff!)
In The Musee Spitzner this [juxtaposition of living structure and emblem of death] is achieved by the creation of a masterly confluence of related themes. First, there is the almost scientific interest Delvaux shows, like so many figurative painters, in the structure of the human body, both in its skeletal form and in its musculature (Delvaux had studied his Vesalius). The skinned male thus appears in The Musee Spitzner, as it appears the following year in another version of the Sleeping Venus, in which it stands before wall-charts illustrating various aspects of the male anatomy. (Surrealizing the Nude, David Scott; the ecorche, or skinned male specimen, Scott describes is in the back left of The Musee Spitzner, and unfortunately barely visible behind the seated woman in the image above.)
So how do we circle back to that Nicole Natri collage, Wounds, at the beginning of the post? Well, another fascinating thing Dr. Hoffmann shared about the Spitzner was that many of the wax surgical models, particularly the obstetrics models, were festooned with disembodied surgical hands! No arms, just cuffed wrists and hands, “operating” on the models. Yikes! I think I find this image more disturbing than the “breathing” wax Venus.
Most anatomical models I’ve seen are arranged cleanly, even elegantly, as if they had always been so - without blood or signs of surgery. A few obligingly hold their bodies open, or pose to show their innards to the viewer: fantasies that pleasantly veil the reality of death. (See my previous post on this topic for examples). But disembodied, foreign hands opening the body for the viewer evoke both the messy, unaesthetic surgery that is really required to reveal those inner structures, and the undeniable fact that, fantasy aside, the body itself is not in control of its own revealing. No matter how drowsy, ecstatic, or peaceful the Venuses look, they’re invaded - if only by our eyes. The hands make that invasion overt; the anonymity of the hands makes them universal. How many hands, over the years, have opened Susini’s Venus, and unfolded her organs? Is invasion the ominous force that permeates Delvaux’s Sleeping Venus - who lies oblivious, while her distraught doppelgangers wail?
Nicole’s piece captures my own disquiet perfectly. The disembodied hands and surgical implements are black-and-white, from another world than the technicolor body underneath them. Their intentions seem ambiguous. Are they clinical, or just curious? And what’s our excuse for looking, anyway?
Designed by Kathleen Walsh, from Walteria Living: a Rorschach blot teapot!
Actually, it’s not a Rorschach. According to the website, the teapot (and matching plates) are based on a much earlier pastime: a Victorian parlor game called Blotto, in which players blotted ink and invented interpretations of the results. No word on whether the mentally imbalanced (or the, ahem, blotto) had an unfair advantage in this game, but apparently Dr. Rorschach, a Blotto fan, was inspired by the game to create his eponymous test:
Rorschach became intrigued by the idea of comparing the Blotto responses of his patients to the responses of Gehring’s students. In 1911, Gehring and Rorschach began experimenting with different inkblots. Also in that year, Eugen Bleuler, who had directed Rorschach’s thesis on hallucinations, published his book on dementia praecox that introduced the alternative label, “schizophrenia.” Rorschach discovered that a repetitive character to the perceptions of certain inkblots existed among those who had the diagnosis of schizophrenia. (Masters of the Mind by Theodore Millon)
The text on the teapot reads “2 altruistic butterflies fly 2 wounded field mice to safety; compassion among species.” That’s kind of sweet.
Nicole Natri is a Swedish collage artist whom I’ve been following for a while. My favorite piece of hers is Loss. . . a simple justaposition that defies simple interpretation. Nicole’s work illustrates that it can be more challenging to create an unpredictable, ambiguous scene than a linear story. As she puts it, “In the progress of making Loss, I made a physical loss a symbol for the psychic one.”
You can see more of Nicole’s work here. Be sure not to miss Halloweenhead and Anguish.
The best part is that Nicole reveals her influences - vintage books, photography, medical art - and works-in-process through her highly individual blog. One of my favorite recent entries include this intimate peep at a vintage fold-out medical book, soon to be subsumed into art. As Nicole says, “I’m obsessed with the cultural history of our body.” No wonder I love her work!
PS. Nicole is stylish as heck (I love her Halloween costume). So jealous!
Before their nursery sanitization, fairy tales were savage. Remember how Cinderella’s stepmother mutilated her own daughters’ feet to fit the glass slipper, but was betrayed by the oozing blood? Or the rape and cannibalism in early versions of Sleeping Beauty? If you don’t, then you haven’t read the oldest versions of these now toothless, Disneyfied stories. Fairy tales once captured the primal violence in human nature all too well.
Fairies themselves were often grotesque and inhumanly cruel, and that’s the pre-Victorian tradition to which the work of artist Tessa Farmer cleaves. Her work juxtaposes dead insects and the remains of birds and snakes with tiny, skeletal fairy sculptures so small, she needs a microscope to assemble them, and viewers need a magnifying glass to appreciate them. Unlike the rosy-cheeked, butterfly-winged fairy girls you find on greeting cards, Farmer’s corpselike fairies rip their prey apart bare-handed, gnawing on the legs of hapless insects like ravenous, humorless Gollums. I would normally find a dead, twisted spider corpse disgusting, but Farmer’s gremlins are far creepier than their victims.
Talking with Tessa Farmer about her work made me think of spiteful little boys who delight in pulling the wings off daddy-long-legs (sic). Seemingly inexplicable, this kind of puerile cruelty actually creates an understanding of the natural world. Pulling something apart helps us to learn how it was put together and how it functioned; it teaches us about life and death and this knowledge helps us to assert our dominance over nature. . .
Farmer is at the centre of all this action. She is complicit in the behaviour of her fairies and yet oddly speaks as if she is removed from it. Distancing herself from the possible carnage the fairies are hatching, she delights in the suggestion that they have the potential to exist independently of her. In this way she heightens our experience of the work, encouraging us to believe it might all be possible and true. Bearing in mind what happened to Dr Frankenstein, however, presumably Farmer herself is at as much risk as the rest of us.
In 2005 I first observed parasitic behaviour among the fairies, which had shrunk to some 7mm tall. ‘Nymphidia’ (named after a sixteenth century fairy poem by Michael Drayton) is another swarm, again revealing scenes of torture and consumption. The focus of the attack is a wasps’ nest, surrounded by fairies battling with wasps and other insects. On closer inspection they can be seen hatching out of wasps in the cells of the nest, by pushing off their heads and climbing out of the hollow shell of the consumed wasp.
The interesting thing to me is that, in reviews and comments on Farmer’s work, and in her own statement, the violence is described in increasingly naturalistic, pseudo-scientific terms. Are these “fairies” or “parasites”? Are they out of nature, or embodying nature? Is Farmer-the-artist, like Dr. Frankenstein before her, a meticulous scientist who reanimates flesh in order to understand it, or a monomaniac blind to the moral implications of her creation? Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw” never seemed so appropriate!
At dinner last night, I disgusted my companions by sharing the appalling reproductive habits of the mite Acarophenaxtribolii(courtesy of the Evilutionary Biologist - I warn you, it’s icky). I wish I could claim I was inspired in this misbehavior by Halloween, but as a biologist, I wander into inappropriate dinner conversation all the time. I can’t help it, really. Thinking about it scientifically, objectively, blunts the horror that kicks in when one begins to instinctively anthropomorphize the mites. Curiosity dominates empathy, and fascination displaces disgust - at least for a time. Biology is full of violence and broken taboos, but these natural relationships carry only the moral baggage we bring to them. The mites don’t know how to live any other way, and judging them or reviling them for it is absurd.
The way Farmer speaks of her work, with clinical detachment, is an invitation to follow her into a morally neutral scientific space. She must know full well that the viewer will be unable to sustain that detachment, because her fairies are not mites. They’re nearly human. And we also empathize with the fairies’ helpless victims - birds, ladybugs, bees, even that unlucky spider, curled and twisted in attitudes of pain that are universal. So despite our best efforts to remain detached, we won’t. Like looking at an optical illusion that oscillates from an old woman to a young girl, or a vase to a pair of profiles, we’ll find ourselves identifying first with the victims, then with the cruel aggressors (in these battles, the fairies seem to rarely be at a disadvantage).
By doing this - by forcing human emotions onto her invented ecosystem - Farmer alludes to the destructive effect humans have had on our world. In the scene below, from Nymphidia, a corpselike fairy erupts from a parasitized honeycomb, snaring an unsuspecting wasp. Nymphidia predates the news of honeybee colony collapse disorder (CCD) - but isn’t it an appropriate representation? Some unknown force, which we may as well depict as a wasp-sized demon, is invading beehives and destroying colonies in the “real” world. This fairy is the wasp/bee Grim Reaper: fanciful, inaccurate, but standing in for a destructive force that actually exists. And it’s fitting that the tiny Reaper is anthropomorphic, because CCD is almost certainly is due to human influence: something in our husbandry practices is making the bees vulnerable.
Nymphidia (detail)
Mixed media
Tessa Farmer, 2005
via Miniature Worlds
In the end, Farmer’s art is barely about “fairies” at all. That is, it’s barely about Disneyfied fairies: Tinkerbell, wishes, magic, romance. It is, of course, very much about the cruel, atavistic fairies of the primal fairy tales - disturbing representations of the extremes of human nature. And it’s human nature that pits us against Nature.
My lingering question about Farmer’s work is this: do the fairies know any better? Are they, like the mites, innocent by reason of insentience? Or are they, like the humans whose skeletons they mimic, not merely violent, but unnecessarily, deliberately cruel? I’d like, as a biologist, to embrace the former. But I think - based especially on her use of words like “torture” - that Farmer intends us to believe the latter. We are Farmer’s fairies. Nature, and we, suffer for it.
“Even the most depraved Barbie doll collector couldn’t top this.” - John Waters
Fans of CSI will be familiar with the “miniature killer” story arc, in which Grissom & company are taunted by a serial killer (with, apparently, a LOT of free time) who builds dollhouse-like crime scenes.
CSI’s writers might have gotten the idea from Frances Glessner Lee, a socialite and forensic science amateur who built similar mini-murder rooms. Called the “Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death,” these nineteen dioramas were used as teaching tools at the Harvard Department of Legal Medicine and now reside at Baltimore in the Maryland Medical Examiner’s Office.
Several of the dioramas, including a barn (above), kitchen, and woodshed, are on display at the National Library of Medicine’s Visible Proofs exhibition (through February 2008).
Frances Glessner Lee, a Chicago heiress, provided for just about every creature comfort when she fashioned 19 dollhouse rooms during the 1940s. She stocked the larders with canned goods and placed half-peeled potatoes by the kitchen sink. Over a crib, she pasted pink striped wallpaper.
But you might not want your dolls to live there.
Miniature corpses — bitten, hanged, shot, stabbed and poisoned — are slumped everywhere. The furnishings show signs of struggles and dissolute lives; liquor bottles and chairs have been overturned; ashtrays overflow.
Lee, a volunteer police officer with an honorary captain’s rank whose father was a founder of the International Harvester Co., used her ghoulish scenes to teach police recruits the art of observation.
She called her miniatures the Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, after a saying she had heard from detectives: “Convict the guilty, clear the innocent and find the truth in a nutshell.” At her thousand-acre estate in Bethlehem, N.H., she set up a workshop called the Nutshell Laboratories. The first woman to become a member of the International Association of Chiefs of Police, she noticed how often officers mishandled evidence and mistook accidents for murders and vice versa. After endowing a new department in legal medicine at Harvard, she created the Nutshells as classroom tools, packing them with tiny but detectable clues: lipstick smears on a pillowcase, a bullet embedded in a wall.
“The inspector may best examine them by imagining himself a trifle less than six inches tall,” she suggested in her curriculum notes. (source)
Morbid Anatomy has some excellent posts lately - if it’s not on your blogroll already, you should go investigate! I was particularly taken with this painting. I suppose it’s memento mori, and I should be thinking about my own mortality and all. Or - wearing my former-anatomy-professor hat - admiring that nice skeleton. But my first impression was astonishment that the living girl - obviously meant to symbolize blooming health - is so Rubenesque. Scholar Peter Gay calls her “strapping,” and she is - strapping in the healthiest sense of the word. I wish I had as little cellulite as she does! The Belgium-born Wiertz, a somewhat controversial but popular painter in his own time, was clearly influenced by Rubens. Today, most Americans would probably consider Wiertz’s nude overweight - what is she, a 12? Egad!
Bless those Romantics, who would no doubt have found Britney Spears too bony in her recent VMA appearance, and would have fattened her up with some nice mutton and beer. (Or, alternatively, bled her. I didn’t say the last century was all good).
It’s also worth noting that in this picture, “beautiful Rosine” is the skeleton, not the living girl. So says the helpful label pasted to her skull.
Collection of Axel Vervoordt
Photo: David Yoder, NYT
Two anatomic models
Collections of Axel Vervoordt / Museo di Storia Naturale, Donazione Conte Querini Stampalia Artempo exhibition in Venice, Italy; NYT review and slide show
One of my favorite blogs, Curious Expeditions, has written what may be the definitive blog post for library lovers. I’ve only been to four of the libraries on the list, but I was at one of them just today, so it was a timely post.
There are definitely more beautiful libraries in Europe, but I’m excited to pop over to Georgetown and see the deliciously steampunky Captain Nemo Riggs Library. Can’t wait for a giant squid to swim past those portholes.
Syphilitic skull with three trephine holes and osteomyelitic lesions
Hunterian museum
One of my favorite London experiences was my visit to the Hunterian museum. If only I had more time there! I liked it so much, I returned on my last day, procrastinating my departure for Heathrow as long as possible.
The Hunterian is tucked away inside the Royal College of Surgeons of England, on Lincoln’s Inn Fields. In its Victorian incarnation, it was a wonderful multi-tiered gallery with railings, balconies, and suspended skeletons:
So I was shocked when I entered the grey, columned Royal College, climbed a graciously curving stairway, and found this extremely modern, two-story crystal-and-glass atrium:
The Crystal Gallery at the Hunterian Museum, Royal College of Surgeons
Definitely not what I was expecting! But it grew on me. I love ornate curiosity cabinets, but there is something very elegant about unadorned bones, and simple glass jars. Biological structures are so rich with intrinsic beauty, there’s no real need to gild the lily (that means you, Damien Hirst).
Though the new Hunterian galleries are peaceful and refined, I felt a slight pang of regret for the railings and wood cabinetry Darwin would have touched, when he studied here in the 1830s and 40s. Unfortunately, many of the specimens Darwin saw were destroyed when the Royal College of Surgeons was bombed in 1941. Like the gallery housing it, John Hunter’s collection is no longer what it once was. But what remains is still pretty darn amazing.
Hunter, a renowned surgeon and fellow of the Royal Society, worked tirelessly to collect medical anomalies like the 7′7″ skeleton of the Irish Giant, Charles Byrne (for which Hunter paid 130 pounds). He also amassed thousands of less exotic teaching specimens: though he did not have access to formaldehyde, he took wet preservation in alcohol to its highest level. After Hunter’s death in 1793, his ~13,000 specimens were purchased by the British state. The collection would be maintained (and enlarged) by the Royal College of Surgeons for the next two hundred years.
Hunter’s collection is organized according to some rather unusual curatorial precepts. As a physician and early experimentalist, Hunter was less interested in taxonomy than in physiology. He grouped specimens not by family or type, but as exemplars of processes - mouthparts and digestion, reproduction, etc. From the Victorian perspective,
The design of Mr. Hunter, in making this collection, was to exhibit the gradations of nature, from the most simple state in which life is found to exist, up to the most perfect and most complex of the animal creation, man himself. By his art, he was able to expose and preserve in a dried state, or in spirits, the corresponding parts of animal bodies; so that the various links in the chain of a perfect being may be readily followed and clearly understood. (Mogg’s New Picture of London and Visitor’s Guide to its Sights, 1844)
But Hunter’s collection does not exemplify linear progression, so much as ramification: the incredible diversity of ways that animal forms have evolved to accomplish given functions. Most of the specimens displayed here are not human; the Hunterian is a shrine not to Man, but to our entire extended family.
I first heard of the Hunterian through the delightful book Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture of Natural History Museums, by Stephen Asma at Columbia College, Chicago. (I highly recommend this book, if you don’t own it already). Asma’s first impression of the Hunterian was similar to my own:
Without a grasp of Hunter’s underlying principles, the cases seemed slightly irrational. In one case, marked “Digestion,” I found various dissections of mammals, parasitic worms, a cicada, a locust, slugs, a squid, a vulture, a woodpecker, and a puffin. This hodgepodge arrangement follows no taxonomic grouping. . . Individual species, genera, and even families are displayed together to illustrate the unique ways that their structures fit the functions of digestion, circulation, respiration, and so forth. (Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, 63)
My copy of Pickled Heads has been with in storage with the rest of my belongings for months, so I’d forgotten Asma’s words. But when I walked up to the first case of Hunter’s jars (mouthparts of squid, beaks, teeth, mouthparts of bees and cicadas), I immediately remembered Asma’s description, and recognized what he meant. The intestines of fish were right next to the stomachs of mammals, including a rat which substantially outweighed the tiny human fetus next to it. There is no mistaking the idiosyncratic style of this little museum, so different from the aggressively educational dioramas of the London Natural History Museum or the Smithsonian Natural History Museum. Modern biology museums are full-color, multimedia entertainment factories - it’s a way to engage the audience, true, but it sometimes teeters toward the tawdry and didactic. Asma expresses the difference far better than I could:
Perhaps the most notable aspect of the Hunterian Museum–besides the bleached and bloated “monsters”–is that it’s not intended for a lay audience. The Hunterian doesn’t really care whether the average person is “getting it.” This is unexpectedly unnerving, since most other museum encounters come complete with torrents of helpful information. Almost every museum specimen that you have ever encountered, be it a fossil, a jar, or a mount, is accompanied by a plaque, a chart, or a recording that announces to you–even before a question has been formulated in your head-”what you are seeing is so and so. . . .”
What was Hunter trying to communicate when he grouped his specimens? This question alone gives one a more interactive relationship with the museum than any computer gadgetry could. (Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads, 78-79)
It’s a little unfair to say the Hunterian doesn’t care if visitors “get it.” I saw a class of kids around twelve years old when I was there, moving in and out of a room set aside for teaching purposes, and they seemed to be “getting it” pretty well. The point is, they were being allowed to draw their own conclusions, and with a little guidance, to simply wander and wonder. Refreshing indeed.
What do I do when confronted with a mute collection of natural wonders? Why, break out the sketchbook. But I didn’t have one! It’s been so long since I felt peaceful enough to sketch in a museum - I’m normally buffeted by thousands of obnoxious children, and worse, tourists who act like children. I wasn’t prepared. I had to buy a little 5″x8″ Moleskine at a nearby bookshop, and sketch with a mechanical pencil while sitting on the floor. Since the museum does not allow photography, not even for earnest, sincere bloggers, these little doodles are all I have to represent Hunter’s myriad curiosities. I can’t believe I didn’t even get to the bound foot, or the lion with rickets, or the male and female ivory anatomical models. Argh.
Sepia officinalis (preparation showing the mouthparts of a cuttlefish)
Hunterian Museum
If you are active in the biomedical professions (and yes, they will ask for proof of this, like an ID card) you may also visit the Wellcome Anatomy and Pathology Museum upstairs.
At first glance, the Wellcome collection seems like the neglected younger sibling of the Hunterian prodigal son (or, if you prefer, the Harry-under-the-stairs to the spoiled Hunterian Dudley Dursley). It’s one outdated, drab room, filled with hundreds of specimen jars. No sexy lighting or pedagogical dioramas here - to figure out what you’re viewing you have to thumb through well-used, slightly sticky binders of notes. These binders are tucked in shelves or tables, wherever the last user left them; I couldn’t find one of the binders at all, so I’m still in the dark about some of the skeletal abnormalities I saw.
But the biggest difference is that the Wellcome specimens are all Homo sapiens, representing a variety of obscure, rare, or dramatic medical conditions - conditions, like keratin horns, that I never expected to personally see in the flesh! And they’re generally in better condition than the Hunterian specimens (most date from the 20th century). I could have spent five to ten minutes examining a single specimen, and there are hundreds of prosections in the Museum. I was completely overwhelmed, and didn’t sketch a single thing (sorry).
I wondered why the Hunterian and Wellcome collections were spatially isolated in this way, and the Wellcome closed to the public. It couldn’t be about shock value - some of the Hunterian exhibits were pretty gruesome. So I asked the head of conservation, who told me that it has to do with the legal status of the collection.
The UK has a long history of scandalous “body-snatching” (see this Curious Expeditions post for more on that nefarious activity). Since the 1832 Anatomy Act, enacted to discourage the illicit sale of body parts, specimens like those in the Wellcome collection have been more and more tightly restricted. Since 2006, the Human Tissues Authority has regulated the donation, disposal, and use of medical specimens and cadavers, and requires special licesning for the public display of remains from persons who died since 1906 (according to their FAQ, they also require licenses of plastination exhibits, such as Body Worlds). But since John Hunter lived, collected, and died years before the Anatomy Act, his collection can be displayed without the restrictions that impact the pathology collection.
Skull of 25-year-old man showing enlargement due to hydrocephalus
Liston collection at Hunterian Museum
I highly recommend both the Hunterian and Wellcome collections to any biologist, artist, kunstkammer fan, or interested layperson visiting London. The Hunterian is perfectly suitable for older children, and surprisingly peaceful for a (free!) museum so close to both the British Library and Inns of Court. There were tourists everywhere, but only a handful stopping by to see John Hunter’s life’s work. You might make a day of it and also visit the Wellcome Collection, around the corner near UCL, or Sir John Soanes Museum, which is literally across the street - but then, I still need to post about those, don’t I?
So much to see, so much to blog, so little time. What a wonderful world.
I saw this at Bibliodyssey. The next day I had to go back and click the link again.
A few days later I went shopping at the always-inspiringAnthropologie, and on returning home, had to go back and browse again. Then I was putting up some of my antique prints on the walls of my new apartment and. . . you guessed it.
I cannot get over how beautiful this book is: the quintessential bibliocabinet of curiosities. And the images are HUGE. Enjoy.
The Browns’ sub model is prettier, but Duke Riley handily wins the contest for best artist’s statement:
My work addresses the prospect of residual but forgotten unclaimed frontiers on the edge and inside overdeveloped urban areas, and their unsuspected autonomy.
I had to read that one a few times. And it gets weirder. According to Riley’s website,
From 1992 to 1997, I lived and worked in an 8 by 10 foot pigeon coop constructed out of a widow’s walk on the roof of an old dilapidated building in Providence, RI. I shared the space with both domestic and street pigeons.
Wouldn’t it have been great if he took pigeons along in the Turtle?
The Bowes Swan; silver fish detail
, by Stephen Asma at Columbia College, Chicago. (I highly recommend this book, if you don’t own it already). Asma’s first impression of the Hunterian was similar to my own:
