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!
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.
Back when I was six or seven, my personal computer was a cassette-tape driven TRS-80, and my favorite game was Pyramid. Pyramid was an endearingly primitive choose-your-own adventure game, in which you gave the program commands it rarely understood, hoping to randomly stumble on something useful, like THROW BIRD. I made it pretty far into the game, only to discover at the heart of the infamous maze of twisty passages, a coin-operated vending machine!
I felt totally ripped off: everyone knows there were no vending machines in ancient Egypt! The game lost some of its luster from this cheap anachronism, and eventually I gave up, moving on to the more fast-paced Centipede clone, Slay the Nereis (OK, I just paused in the middle of writing this post to waste thirty minutes playing Atari’s online version of Centipede. I still get a thrill from the sound of those falling fleas, but how I miss the arcade version’s rollerball).
Anyway, it turns out that Egyptian vending machine wasn’t such a stretch after all. Ancient machines that were derided as toys or flights of fancy are now taken seriously by archaeologists and engineers. The Antikythera mechanism is the best example of this (there was an excellent article about it in the May 15 New Yorker). And Cabinet of Wonders just posted a wonderful essay and collection of links on ancient automata. It’s incredibly interesting reading.
Apparently there was a coin-operated vending machine (for holy water!) two thousand years ago - designed by the Greek engineer Hero of Alexandria (or Heron). That was long after the Pyramids were built, but who knows? Maybe Hero wasn’t the first to figure it out. The Antikythera Mechanism survived, albeit in terrible condition, but how many gadgets, including proto-computers and primitive robots, have been lost? It’s a dizzying question - but also an important reminder that biologically, we are neither more intelligent nor more creative now than our ancestors were a few thousand years ago. We’re just starting at a much higher technological baseline.
Alice (film, 1988)Jan SvankmajerIn the Boston Review, celebrated fantasy author John Crowley (Little, Big) reviews the photography/art of Rosamond Purcell (I blogged about Purcell’s photography for National Geographic and her 2006 book, Bookworm, last fall). Crowley says:
Rosamond Purcell’s photographs—all still lifes—are of things, and they are usually things we recognize, whether we have encountered them before or not; but our recognition is undermined because we don’t know how they got that way. We are asked to examine her recording with the same wonder, salted with revulsion, that she has brought to her examination of the object.
I love Purcell, so Crowley was preaching to an enthusiastic choir. But in his last paragraph he introduced me to another artist I can’t believe I’ve never heard of: surrealist filmmaker Jan Svankmajer.
I recently re-saw (why is there no visual equivalent of the word “reread”?) the 1988 film Alice, by Jan Svankmajer, the great Czech stop-motion animator. His version of Alice in Wonderland is so full of connections to the work and spirit of Purcell as to seem nearly a collaboration. Svankmajer’s Alice, a dark fearless girl, becomes a chipped antique doll when she drinks the inky potion that makes her small; the White Rabbit is a decaying stuffed specimen who tears himself from the box he is kept in, pulling out the nail that pins his foot, and thereafter leaks stuffing loathsomely. Alice falls through a world of things bottled in dark fluid that may be animal parts but also include buttons, keys, and other things; she makes her way through piles of soiled junk, drinks from stained, cracked porcelain.
Crowley’s quite right - this is like Purcell’s stuff come alive. I was hooked as soon as the frantic, glass-eyed White Rabbit pulled his pocketwatch out of his own sawdust viscera! The first six minutes are pure wonder cabinet. In the end, says Crowley,
Things transmute, as she observes or takes hold of them, from animate to inanimate and back (a scene of ancient socks that become wriggly snakes or caterpillars who bore sawdusty holes in a wooden floor, then crawl in and out of them). In all of this Alice is unafraid; more, she is curious (“curiouser and curiouser”) and attracted to the things offered, even the bugs that pour from opened cans and the rotted fabrics and papers—avid for strangeness, selective and judgmental, but willing, always, to go farther.
Curiouser and curiouser. In such avid, fearless pursuit of wonder, the child, scientist, historian, artist and author are all the same, aren’t they? Go get ‘em, Alice!PS. I go thirty years without ever hearing of Svankmajer, but it turns out Table of Malcontents posted about him (with a link to the sock-caterpillar scene) just two weeks ago! How did I miss that? It seems I was destined to discover him anyway. Curiouser and curiouser. . .Update: dude, what the heck? Shortly after I posted this, the Guardian released a review of Svankmajer! He’s everywhere!More: Brigid Cherry on Alice: “Dark Wonders and the Gothic Sensibility” (2002)
Bodyscope Anatomical Chart, 1935
approximately 20″ x 16″
Ralph H. Segal, Bodyscope Publications Inc.,
Educational Building, 70 5th Ave., NYC
From 1935, two ornate Bodyscope teaching charts. Three windows in each chart allow a cutaway view of the torso and its accompanying legends (in the arches on either side) to rotate, providing five different views of the internal organs. A numbered key below the figure indicates which of the organ systems is currently displayed. The University of Kansas Clendening Library has a complete set of images in its collection (of the male, the female, and a third organ system chart).
The combination of period fonts, Art deco flourishes, and almost iconographic framing is charming. The spandrels on either side of the arched legends hold portraits of historical luminaries of medicine like Vesalius. Most of the text is anatomical description. However, the legends directly above the figures relate not to science, but to the larger social & moral context in which human anatomy was taught. For the man:
Man’s great Accomplishments and noble Aspirations are achieved through the possession of a Sound Mind and a Healthy Body . . . In these Attributes lie the Bulwark of Man’s Social, Moral, and Domestic Structure: the Foundation which perpetuates Humanity’s Existence.
For the woman:
Woman, her creative body as wisely patterned by God, is the Abode wherein the Seed is endowed with Life and imbued with a Soul. . . Her Maternal nurturing and inspirational influence are reflected in Mankind’s aspirations; the fruits of which become her Reward.
What a contrast between active and passive roles! Man is the disciplined architect, woman the. . . gardener? Man “perpetuates Humanity’s Existence” (I thought that particular activity involved both sexes), while the woman gets Rewarded with symbolic fruits. Nice. It’s interesting, though not surprising, that such moralizing was considered an appropriate way to preface medical education.
For additional detail, have a look at this near-mint specimen offered by Stonegate Antiques.
Incidentally, the Bodyscope chart set is labeled both “copyright 1935″ and “patent pending.” I can’t find evidence of a patent actually issuing. However, one RH Segal is the inventor of record on another patent from 1935, for a perpetual calendar which also employed a system of paper dials. It’s likely the same individual.
Hajime Emoto’s cryptozoological specimens are so convincing, I have trouble believing they’re conjured up with paper and bamboo. But this collection(Google translation) representing the seven deadly sins, incarnate and mummified, finally convinced me. I don’t want them to be real.
I think they’re viscerally creepy, in a way that his dragons and sea life are not. Coming from someone with a collection of dead insects and (real) bones, isn’t that an oddly contextual reaction? Is the collection a kind of litmus test for latent superstition?
Unfortunately the artist’s site is entirely in Japanese, but to orient you, it’s arranged as a virtual “fantastic specimen museum” with three floors and a basement. An index to all the galleries is here (Google translation).
Of course, if you’re going to plan a summer jaunt to Europe to commune with medical models, why limit yourself to wax and moulage? Curious Expeditions also “ran into” an ivory obstetric figurine by Zick at the Semmelweis Medical Museum, and have a smashing flickrset of the occasion, from which I abducted the Venus image at the top of this post. I’m convinced Curious Expeditions are the new Rick Steves of the wunderkammer set. . .
I have not gotten a single thing done today, because I’ve spent hours browsing the archive of assemblage artist Ron Pippin. Has there ever been a more charming collection of steampunk-influenced taxidermical wonder-boxes?
This cryptically inscribed muskrat skull (above) is exactly my cup of Victorian-naturalist tea. And the partially mechanized vignettes, like “The Operation,” are simply haunting:
The Operation (detail)
Ron Pippin, 1994
Ron Pippin has been represented by the Sherry Frumkin Gallery and Obsolete, Inc. But I can’t find a current exhibit of his work - if anyone knows where he might be showing pieces, let me know.
My friend Lorraine alerted me to this amazing ceramic tableware by Laura Zindel. Zindel says:
I believe that some objects can carry a personal history through a family from year to year. I hope that I can make art that a family member can buy to be handed down the line. Something bought on a whim, that becomes the platter for the turkey, or sits on the mantel. “Crazy old Uncle Larry bought that peculiar spider platter, and we just can’t seem to part with it”, I would like to be a part of that.
I’m far from squeamish, but I don’t know about those tarantulas. . . I love the snakes and beetles, though.
These patterns would rock a wedding registry - any entomologists/herpetologists getting married out there?
Illustrations for Antikamnia Chemical Company Calendars, 1900 & 1897
Louis Crucius, ~1890
BibliOdyssey turned up this wicked advertising campaign by turn-of-the-century pharmaglomerate Antikamnia Chemical Company. The calenders were targeted at medical professionals, not the average consumer, for whom I presume a baby skeleton in a christening gown would be a slight turn-off.
I like the little pharmoompa-loompas the best. I wish I’d had some in grad school. Or for grading exams. . .
By the way, this is exactly why illustrators need skulls as references. Crucius must have had access to a newborn’s skull as well: note the broad, thin mandible and the diamond-shaped fontanel (soft spot) on top of the head. It’s a fairly accurate drawing.
On Monday, a rare Siberian mammoth skeleton sold for nearly half a million dollars at auction. The skeleton was inexplicably named “The President.”
A number of other curiosity-cabinet staples, like a bezoar, also sold, racking up a total of $1.5 million. The auction is a sign of increasing interest in natural history collectibles. Scientists complain such specimens shouldn’t be sold to private collectors, where they become inaccessible to researchers, but at these prices museums can’t compete. And as with early 20th century art, it seems provenance problems follow skyrocketing prices. A Russian official has challenged the origin of auctioned fossils.
An incredible Victorian novelty. Complete in mahogany box with revolver, silver bullets, garlic powder, silver dagger, ivory cross, mirror, Professor Blomberg`s New Vampire Serum, wooden stake, etc.
Fortunately, Clive Thompson assures us there can’t be more than 512 vampyric bloodsuckers running around at the moment. It’s ecologically implausible. (Although the population model makes debatable assumptions about vampyric reproduction - a topic on which Whedon, Rice, Stoker, le Fanu, etc. don’t agree).
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:
last fall). Crowley says:
